Space after Deleuze 9781441111883, 9781441192134, 9781441179838, 1441111883

Table of contents :
Cover page......Page 1
Halftitle page......Page 2
Series page......Page 3
Title page......Page 4
Copyright page......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
CONTENTS......Page 8
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 10
ABBREVIATIONS......Page 11
Introduction......Page 14
CHAPTER ONE Earth......Page 20
Ungrounding......Page 21
Geo-philosophy......Page 26
Strata......Page 29
Geologies......Page 30
Phyla......Page 36
Mechanosphere......Page 39
Plateaus......Page 43
Geocommunism......Page 46
Marxists......Page 47
Universalization......Page 51
CHAPTER TWO Flows......Page 58
Multiplicities......Page 59
Nomads......Page 65
Islands......Page 74
People-to-come......Page 78
Axioms......Page 83
Deterritorialization......Page 87
World-systems......Page 90
Schizophrenia......Page 93
War......Page 95
Speeds......Page 96
War-machines......Page 99
Combat......Page 103
Flat......Page 109
Molecular......Page 114
CHAPTER THREE Places......Page 118
Territories......Page 119
Striation......Page 120
Refrains......Page 126
Lines......Page 132
Segmentarity......Page 136
Bodies......Page 139
Affects......Page 140
Bodies-without-organs......Page 145
Faciality......Page 152
Planes......Page 156
Networks......Page 163
Ghettos......Page 168
Any-spaces-whatever......Page 172
Events......Page 177
CHAPTER FOUR Maps......Page 184
Virtual......Page 185
Difference......Page 192
Egg......Page 197
Cartographies......Page 202
Expressionism......Page 208
Baroque......Page 213
Time......Page 218
REFERENCES......Page 224
INDEX......Page 228

Citation preview

Space After Deleuze

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DELEUZE ENCOUNTERS Series Editor: Ian Buchanan, Professor and Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong, Australia. The Deleuze Encounters series provides students in philosophy and related subjects with concise and accessible introductions to the application of Deleuze’s work in key areas of study. Each book demonstrates how Deleuze’s ideas and concepts can enhance present work in a particular field.

Series titles include: Cinema After Deleuze, Richard Rushton Philosophy After Deleuze, Joe Hughes Political Theory After Deleuze, Nathan Widder Theology After Deleuze, Kristien Justaert Feminist Theory After Deleuze, Hannah Stark Space After Deleuze, Arun Saldanha Music After Deleuze, Edward Campbell Masculinity After Deleuze, Anna Hickey-Moody and Timothy Laurie Media After Deleuze, Tauel Harper and David Savat

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Space After Deleuze ARUN SALDANHA

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Arun Saldanha, 2017 Arun Saldanha has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : 978-1-4411-1188-3 ePDF : 978-1-4411-9213-4 ePub: 978-1-4411-7983-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Deleuze Encounters Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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In memoriam Doreen Massey

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations x

Introduction 1 Earth

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Geophilosophy Ungrounding – Geo-philosophy Strata Geologies – Phyla – Mechanosphere – Plateaus Geocommunism Marxists – Universalization

2 Flows

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Populations Multiciplicities – Nomads – Islands – People-to-come Capital Axioms – Deterritorialization – World-systems – Schizophrenia War Speeds – War-machines – Combat Scale Flat – Molecular

3 Places

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Territories Striation – Refrains – Lines – Segmentarity vii

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CONTENTS

Bodies Affects – Bodies-without-organs – Faciality Cities Planes – Networks – Ghettos – Any-spaces-whatever Events

4 Maps

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Intensity Virtual – Difference – Egg Folding Expressionism – Baroque Time References 211 Index 215

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Ian Buchanan for suggesting I write this book for the “Deleuze Encounters” series he started at Continuum. Many thanks to Frankie Mace, editor at Bloomsbury Academic, for her patience during the book’s materialization. As is well known, sustained focus for writing is becoming a rare luxury in academia. Hence I have had to temper the book’s ambitions. For instance, debates about representationalism and spacetime in physics will be left for another time, and some important elements of Deleuzian geography are as yet embryonic here. Deleuze is a variegated thinker who only makes sense within debate. My gratitude goes to a long series of friends with whom I have enjoyed conversations that inflect my readings of him, like Jason Michael Adams, Ateeb Ahmed, Ben Anderson, Kai Bosworth, Bruce Braun, Cesare Casarino, Nigel Clark, Kate Derickson, Patrick De Vos, Kostas Dolgeras, Vinay Gidwani, Rogério Haesbaert da Costa, Paul Harrison, George Henderson, Garnet and Kate Kindervater, Paul Kingsbury, Kiarina Kordela, Ioulia Mermigka, Stuart McLean, Heidi Nast, Aislinn O’Donnell, Simona Sawhney, Anna Secor, Rachel Slocum, Hoon Song, Jan Teurlings, Miriam Tola, Iris van der Tuin, Keith Woodward, Kathryn Yusoff, and many others. Thanks too for the encouragements over the years from scholars well known in Deleuze studies (apart from Ian), like Ronald Bogue, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, Peter Hallward, Eugene Holland, Joe Hughes, Christian Kerslake, Brian Massumi, Paul Patton, Keith Ansell Pearson, Charlie Stivale, and James Williams. Finally, thanks to my family in Belgium for allowing me time to write during my visits. This book is dedicated to the economic and feminist geographer Doreen Massey, my doctoral supervisor at The Open University, who died unexpectedly while I was finishing it. It is through her I came to think well about space.

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ABBREVIATIONS

All references by Deleuze, unless stated otherwise, followed by date of first (and second) editions in French. See References for details on English translations. This is not a complete Deleuze and Guattari bibliography. ABC

“Gilles Deleuze from A to Z”, television interview with Parnet (1988–89)

AO

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with Guattari (1972)

ATP

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with Guattari (1980)

B

Bergsonism (1966)

C1

Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983)

C2

Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985)

CC

Coldness and Cruelty (1967)

CLU

Communists Like Us (Guattari and Negri, 1985/1990)

D

Dialogues II (with Parnet, 1977/1986)

DI

Desert Islands (2002)

DR

Difference and Repetition (1968)

DW

“Description of woman” (1945)

ECC

Essays Critical and Clinical (1993)

EPS

Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968)

FLB

The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988)

F

Foucault (1986)

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ABBREVIATIONS

FB

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981)

K

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, with Guattari (1975)

LS

The Logic of Sense (1969)

MR

Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (Guattari, 1972 and 1977)

MRB

Molecular Revolution in Brazil (Guattari, with Rolnick, 1986/2005)

MU

The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (Guattari, 1979)

N

Negotiations (1995)

NP

Nietzsche and Philosophy (1965)

PS

Proust and Signs (1964/1976)

R

Lectures on Rousseau (1960)

SC

Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari, 1989)

SPP

Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970/1981)

SP

“Statements and profiles” (1945)

SS

Soft Subversions (Guattari, 2009)

TE

The Three Ecologies (Guattari, 1989)

TRM

Two Regimes of Madness (2004)

WG

What is Grounding? (lectures 1956–57)

WP

What Is Philosophy? with Guattari (1991)

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Introduction Deleuze is a highly original thinker who cannot be easily classified in one philosophical tradition or another. Though his oeuvre adds up to a consistent system, there is disagreement about even such fundamental aspects as his indebtedness to the Enlightenment, his relationship to psychoanalysis and Marxism, the metaphysical status of his monism and pluralism, and the reasoning behind his writing style. Deleuze has been proven to be an empiricist, vitalist, philosopher of mathematics, closet Hegelian, phenomenologist, crypto-Jungian, logician, anarchist, communist, elitist, and liberal. In fact he is none of these. If Deleuze at times tends towards one of them he tends towards another in the next twist. One thing most readers agree on, at least, is that he is one of the most genuine and ambitious thinkers of the postwar period. Unlike many others of his generation Deleuze is a philosopher in the classical manner, who spans most domains of knowing. Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, and Lyotard each in their way herald a death, or at least a dying, of philosophy as the grand project of system-building and timeless ethical prerogatives. The only other key French thinker who seeks to reawaken the power of critical thinking in its full spectrum is Alain Badiou. That makes him Deleuze’s main rival. Deleuze travels across the whole field of thought, including art, physical science, social science, polemic, ethics, and the history of philosophy to pursue the big questions that have always animated philosophy. What is being? How to live? What is wrong with present society? How is change possible? Why think at all? Deleuze’s thought derives from very disparate sources, and some readers 1

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complain that the style of, especially A Thousand Plateaus, is nothing more than postmodern eclecticism, which makes studying the real world even more difficult than it already is. But in fact Deleuze’s style deliberately seeks to capture the way reality works, its diagram or logic. What this means for theorizing space is that this book will be able to approach it from very diverse angles. Running through it are four clusters of presuppositions that will become clearer as we proceed. First, space might be the most important of all concepts. While the discipline that deals most comprehensively with space as such is geography, no other knowledge practice, from engineering, evolutionary biology, and geochemistry to literature, cinema, and logic, is even conceivable without some sense of spatiality. This means space is often, and necessarily, approached through the many other concepts it is intertwined with, like environment, boundary, language, city, mobility, structure, and biopower, all specific to specific disciplines. More specifically, “space” (l’espace) in this book encompasses not only urban space and other landscapes (that is, anthropomorphized areas of the earth), as is often the case in French and English theorizing after Lefebvre, Foucault, and Certeau and the so-called spatial turn in social science (cf. Buchanan and Lambert 2005, Saldanha 2006). Space in this book will be closer to the general or cosmic spatiality of physics after Galileo and Newton, although with Deleuze we will affirm its heterogeneous, intensive, and embodied workings. Second, though there are many reasons internal to theoretical tradition for an explicit concept of space, it is more interesting to understand how and why theory is in fact forced to conceptualize space by its own situatedness. Deleuze’s approach to philosophy is resolutely materialist: “Something in the world forces us to think” (DR 139). In particular, this book suggests that the crisis situation of the planetary surface, including of course its social formations, is demanding to be thought anew. Deleuze gives a new answer to Heidegger’s question what it means to think. There is an ethical impulse that triggers and sustains our approach of space, even though we cannot unproblematically derive moral imperatives from our geography, the ought from the is. As we will soon see, the nature of the earth itself is to be deeply problematic and open-ended. The criteria for calling some things either good or bad change according to the projects that our study of space forms part of.

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Third, like most twentieth-century thinkers Deleuze does not have an extensive philosophy of space, despite having elaborated one of the most original modern philosophies of time. The chapters to follow will show that his work nevertheless contributes brilliantly to thinking space, especially his work with Félix Guattari. I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus because its geographical thematic is the most pronounced. It might have been more creative to derive a concept of space from Deleuze’s less explicitly spatial writings, interviews, and lectures. But the primary objective here is to demonstrate that a rich spatiality is already obvious in his bestknown work. Fourth, this book will affirm that space is real, not the mental category it is for Kant (1999: 57–62). Contemporary human geography is mostly realist in the epistemological sense and has abandoned the early-modern views of space as absolute and the same everywhere. Space is quite simply that which lends things their capacities to move and to differ. Space is difference, multiplicity, change, and movement, not some separate formal realm that would frame them. There is no time without space. If critical geography has done much to debunk the still-hegemonic conception of space as static and exterior to process (Massey 2005), this book will show that Deleuze provides one of the best philosophical resources for continuing and refining the project of giving a dynamic thickness to space. Indeed, Deleuze has in some corners of geography become almost the default philosopher (Doel 2000, Anderson et al. 2012). Both Deleuze and geography are strongly multidisciplinary, and both are closely tied to ethics and politics. It is an irony that while maps are becoming ubiquitous it becomes ever more difficult to gain a clear picture of the immense mass of flows we call globalization. In fact, following a basic Marxist argument, space under capitalism per definition makes much of its workings illegible until disaster strikes and it is too late. What is particularly important in the twenty-first century is to map the disastrous planetary situation called the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene could become the most critical concept ever invented, and it is potentially a thoroughly Deleuzian one (see Clark 2014). It is the name of the geological epoch that a wide range of scientists and scholars are proposing follows the Holocene, which started after the last ice age or 11,700 years ago. The physical impact on the planet of the human species has passed a threshold of future

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detectability, especially since the beginnings of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century. Industrialization has made so many species go extinct, rerouted so much of the carbon, water, sand, and nitrogen cycles of the earth’s crust and atmosphere, and left so many human structures behind, that a geological intelligence a hundred million years from now will be able to infer that the Holocene ended in our times (Zalasiewicz 2009). As global public debate is increasingly gearing towards the question of how to avoid the Anthropocene’s catastrophic injustices in the coming century, its most compelling aspect might be its universality. It forces humanity (anthropos, man) to confront the structural inequalities and atrocities that have always accompanied “progress” and the very definition of “man.” More specifically, the ancient Greco-Judeo-Christian fantasy called anthropocentrism has allowed a small subset of the human species to assume it has the right to dominate the rest of the species and the planet, because it would be different in kind and intrinsically superior. If tied to the critiques of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, the Anthropocene concept could become the most radical concept ever. I think Deleuze and Guattari would have cherished its unparalleled power to enable ruptures in knowledge and politics. However, we first require theoretical tools to critically understand how earth, flow, place, and intensive difference constitute human populations. Thinking the practice of thinking – or what is special about humans – is therefore itself an exercise in thinking space. Philosophy emerges somewhere, and only there. It has to carefully select and filter forces from its milieu. It gives its concepts internal consistency as they flow and clash, by relating them to their real-world circumstances but also to the ways they have been used before by others. Deleuze and Guattari’s last book, What is Philosophy?, is attuned, as few others are, to the spatiality of concepts themselves. Concepts live on two levels, within the concrete time of actual philosophers that struggle over their meaning, and within an abstract or transcendental time, the outside-time or an ideal space where they remain available for further elaboration and contestation. “Although concepts are dated, signed, and baptized, they have their own way of not dying while remaining subject to constraints of renewal, replacement, and mutation that give philosophy a history as well as a turbulent geography, each moment and place of which is preserved (but in time) and that passes (but outside time)” (WP

INTRODUCTION

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8). For Deleuze concepts are sustained along two temporalities, two planes, the empirical and the transcendental. The quasi-eternity of the ideal space of Deleuze’s concepts is not, however, the tranquil realm of Platonic and religious ideas, but “turbulent,” changing continuously as they are variously jolted into life. The explanations of Deleuzian, Guattarian, and Deleuze-Guattarian ideas in this book are not definitions or axioms in the traditional sense going back to Euclid, which attempt to forever define boundaries and directions. They are more like creases in the map of trajectories of thinking, possible openings that have to be further developed, combined, or discarded. This book covers a lot of ground, at high, sometimes breakneck, speed. This gives little room for digging into the wider architectonic and network of influences of Deleuze’s arguments. In choosing breadth over depth and density over incremental steps the objective is to demonstrate his oeuvre is already geographical. The result might be somewhat all over the place, but this increases the chances for those new to Deleuze to gain an entryway into his thinking of space, while more seasoned readers can gain a new appreciation of what could prove to be the most geographical philosopher of the modern period. We will not explicitly connect Deleuze and Guattari to the debates of geography, planning, architecture, or the many other disciplines where they have steadily been gaining a foothold, though it is definitely recommended to consult critical geography (especially Massey 2005, Harvey 2011, and Smith 2008) and the existing secondary literature on Deleuze and space (especially Antonioli 2004, Bonta and Protevi 2004, Buchanan and Lambert 2005, DeLanda 2002, and Frichot, Gabrielsson, and Jonathan 2016). The intention is instead to introduce a meshwork of concepts so that a systematic Deleuzian spatiality becomes possible across them. Finally, this book shares with Félix Guattari’s life and work a sense of political urgency and enthusiasm for the heterogeneous knowledges that can help politics move forward. Guattari’s concept of Integrated World Capitalism, his “plan for the planet” in the late 1970s (MR 262-72), and the “ecosophy” at the end of his life are more relevant than ever, even if his experimentalism does at a certain point – that of Schizoanalytic Cartographies – becomes its own theoretical black hole threatening to botch the political or research elaborations it should be inspiring. Now, Deleuze is not

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INTRODUCTION

Guattari. As we will see, Deleuze’s take on politics and ethics is often indistinguishable from his metaphysics. Precisely for that reason it is not without ambiguity: it is ambiguous in a revolutionary way. Some might disagree with my overly politicized explanation and elaboration of concepts. My defense is that if Guattari be allowed to use Deleuzian concepts and call himself a renegade communist, so can I, with whatever errors, annoyances, and incompletenesses this gesture may entail. The geography of concepts is turbulent. Space “after” Deleuze can mean three things. First, this book will examine what space is according to Deleuze, even if, as stated above, it must be gleaned from his own rather diffuse engagement. Second, the Deleuze-event in theorizing, perhaps especially regarding global capitalism and becoming-revolutionary, forces us to rethink old categories with new philosophical tools. There is a before and an after Deleuze. And third, theory evolves, and Deleuze cannot be our only or final inspiration. To think space constructively we will sometimes arrive at the limits of Deleuze’s system. In a few places, especially as contrasted with Badiou, this will require offering criticism. But Deleuze himself never read anyone without his own, often mischievous, agenda. Guattari didn’t either. What their philosophical ethos offers first of all is an openness to the possibility of thought, which repeats the openness of space itself.

CHAPTER ONE

Earth At the beginning of the twenty-first century theorists have become increasingly forced to acknowledge the incontrovertible entanglement of humans, of thinking itself, with the rest of physical reality. In many ways this acknowledgment is still dealing with the decentering of the earth in Copernicus and the mathematical physics of Galileo. But then there is Kant, whose second “Copernican Revolution” consisted in the critique of any appeals to an automatic access to real space and the essences of things. Kant (1999) invented new premises for constructing rules for knowing the world and living in fidelity to them. The subject–object split after Kant defines much of philosophical modernity, but poststructuralist interrogations have put heavy strain on it. Across disciplines, the Kantian distinctions between man and animal, mind and body, and society and nature are being attacked. Processes like climate change and computer viruses raise the question of whether it is still desirable at all to define a spatiality or realm unique to the human species. Starting from the violence of planetary process we will see in this chapter how Deleuze rekindles Kant’s project of perpetual construction, yet also radicalizes the latter’s Copernican decentering of the human. Like Kant, Deleuze is more-than-empirical, critical, and ethical. But unlike Kant, Deleuze relaunches thinking from within material and virtual spacetime itself, which cannot be predefined as a total and delineable category. Deleuzian thinking does not aim to secure permanent laws of its own functioning. It tries to capture its own flowingness, the way it is centrifugal and 7

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monstrous. In removing the grounds for a self-sufficient human perspective yet continuing to “believe in the world” (a phrase from What is Philosophy? that we will discuss) and the necessity to think it, Deleuze provides an indispensable apparatus for grappling with the planetary crisis of the twenty-first century.

Geophilosophy Following the chapter called “Geophilosophy” in What is Philosophy?, this section returns briefly to the beginnings of European philosophy in Greece to theorize how philosophy, myth, and geography have always been tied together, even if they have to be clearly distinguished. Nietzsche’s retrieval of earth predates and influences the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, which they propose against Heidegger. First, however, we need to pass through the earth on a slightly more metaphorical level to gain a foothold on thinking itself, which we can understand with Kant as a practice of constructing, an architectonic.

Ungrounding Deleuze was always interested in a question basic to the philosophical enterprise: what is the ground of thought? A lecture series of 1956– 57, “What is grounding?,” covered questions such as: How is thinking possible? In what is it housed? What is its horizon? What does it turn to? World, mind, body, gods, things, essences, signs, ground: philosophy starts by arranging these spatially. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze says it is not for nothing that in the dominant tradition we say a philosopher has “his head up in the clouds.” “As we ask [with Kant], ‘what is it to be oriented in thought?’, it appears that thought itself supposes axes and orientations according to which it develops, that it has a geography before having a history” (LS 127). We call thinking well-grounded when its foundation is guaranteed through what is deemed good, through the mathematical, or through repeated observation. This dominant philosophical methodology (what Difference and Repetition calls an image of thought) is often called foundationalist when it believes it can depend on a more or less solid ground or foundation outside itself.

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For Plato, the inaugurator of academic philosophy and European theology, political theory, and aesthetics, the sky or heaven is the ground of thinking. In this foundationalism the true reality is that of eternal essences or Ideas located far above the dark cave inhabited by physical beings, who only encounter the copies and simulations of Ideas. Foundationalism became perfectly literal in the cosmology of Ptolemy, in whose long-dominant system of geocentrism the earth’s tangible groundedness persists at the center of the universe. Until the Renaissance, geocentrism and the celestial foundation of thinking were both taken for granted. Even when Descartes concluded that he could be fully certain only of his own radical doubting, there remained a touch of God that sparked his doubting in the first place. Then Kant brought a major blow to the foundationalist legacy by making immanence the key to the philosophical project. Instead of the world having to comply to divine essences up above, Kant’s world complies to the rational subject here below. Instead of reason participating in the infinite, it justifies and constitutes itself through its own limitations and labors. Deleuze gives a standard summary in his lecture notes: Kant poses and leaves a problem to philosophy: finitude as such insofar as finitude is constitutive. Before him the subject was made to turn around the object (as in Ptolemy). He claims to discover the dimension of subjectivity (as in the Copernican Revolution). He makes the objects turn around the subject. It’s not about elevating man to the place of God. On the contrary, the reasonable being is defined by opposition to infinity. WG 150–51, translation modified Copernicus showed that the earth was not the ground and center for astronomical calculations. Kant’s self-proclaimed second Copernican Revolution is a continued questioning of heaven, but also, somewhat paradoxically, a return to earth and to the human perspective. Kantian thinking is an examination of the limited coordinates of human reason, which can thereby start problematizing everything anew, including infinity and God. In Coldness and Cruelty, an essay that has otherwise little to do with metaphysics, Deleuze at one point reminds us how his project is but a radicalization of Kant: “It is in the nature of the transcendental inquiry that we cannot break it off when we please. No sooner have we reached the

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condition or ground of our principle than we are hurdled headlong beyond to the absolutely unconditioned, the ‘ground-less’ from which the ground itself emerged” (CC 114). Much of “What is grounding?” necessarily focuses on Kant, but Deleuze also discusses Heidegger, who at the time had gone furthest since Kant in raising the question about the act of thinking itself. Heidegger (2010) criticized Kant’s notion of the transcendental subject for retaining a metaphysical approach to how human being emerges. There can be no way for thinking to secure itself so straightforwardly either through reason or intuition. Thinking is founded not on a ground (Grund) but from within an abyss (Abgrund). This “groundless ground” of Heidegger can seem nihilistic. Why even start thinking if it plunges us straight into nothingness? But philosophy is important for Heidegger precisely because of modern society’s onslaught on it. There is an authentic sense of being it is philosophy’s task to recover. This desire for authenticity is where Heidegger falters from the Deleuzian perspective. His initially promising ungrounding becomes immediately reterritorialized, however implicitly, onto racial destiny. Heidegger’s might be the most fascinating and seductive misapprehending of thought’s relation to the earth in the history of philosophy. He orients thought to “the wrong people, earth, and blood,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it in What is Philosophy?. “For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather the oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race” (WP 109). A return to the earth should avoid reintroducing even the slightest desire for origins. Heimat, community, Mother Earth, and the phenomenological exultation of the ordinary are variations on the same modern need for transcendence through and in place. If it is to be consistent, atheism has to break completely with the prior privileging of the authenticity of place. Deleuze’s entire project can be seen like Heidegger’s as one long answer to the post-Kantian question of how to ground thought. For both, thinking is groundless. To emerge and proceed, thought must affirm itself as groundless and as self-differentiating. Deleuze shares with Heidegger the desire to push thinking into worldliness, hence a keen sense of spatiality. Building on Nietzsche they both call “earth” a realm where life under industrial modernity could be revalorized. But where Heidegger thinks under the sway of a pagan sort of

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poetics and emphasizes the possibilities of a post-religious sacred in the here and now, Deleuze is more consistently critical and atheist and stays much closer to Nietzsche’s refusal of transcendence and identity. For Deleuze, thinking has to eschew the typically modern need for authenticity and truth. Instead of Heidegger’s return to the efflorescence of everyday life and homeland, Deleuze’s ontology systematically embraces vagrancy, even delinquency. Philosophy for Deleuze requires a universal ungrounding (effondement) propelled by the “discovery of a ground behind every other ground” (DR 67). In his notion of groundlessness Heidegger continues to search for some kind of wholeness and redemption from human finitude. Deleuze instead makes immanence itself infinite. Hence when he speaks of a “vertigo of immanence” (WP 48) we have to imagine a dizziness engendered not by being suspended above a gaping void but by the excessive fullness of what is given with sensation, that is, with living in and through space. Heidegger keeps yearning for the premodern possibility of vertical ascendance, while thinking after Kant should aim to circulate on a horizontal plane of immanence accompanying physical spacetime itself. Deleuze and Heidegger are both indebted to Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism. Both return to the earthly materialism of the preSocratics. Instead of remaining resentful about the essences outside the cave, thinking should be content examining the supposedly false and inauthentic things around it. “There are dimensions here, times and places, glacial or torrid zones never moderated, the entire exotic geography which characterizes a mode of thought as well as a style of life” (LS 128). The true philosopher “refuses to be drawn out of the cave, finding instead another cave beyond, always another in which to hide” (DR 67). The continuous movement of ungrounding, of rejecting transcendence, of exiting the cave and its moralities and determinisms, becomes itself a new kind of ground. The movement of thought away from transcendence is dedicated to producing something new, a new earth: the new – in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita. What forces does this new bring to bear upon thought, from what central bad nature and ill will does it spring, from what central ungrounding

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which strips thought of its “innateness”, and treats it every time as something which has not always existed, but begins, forced and under constraint? DR 136 Spatial concepts are never mere metaphors, perhaps especially not in the battle between transcendence and immanence. The founding of philosophy is always an exercise in abstract topography. Groundlessness is ever-receding, amorphous, but it is neither a positivity nor a nothingness. It has to be discovered again and again as an excessiveness simultaneously demanding and overwhelming the act of thinking. Thinking ventures into the radically open and undetermined: what Deleuze in Foucault calls the Outside, which are not out-worldly dimensions but the dimensions of concrete life thus far unmapped by knowledge. Philosophy has tended to assume truth and reality are characterized by stability and trustworthiness, but Nietzsche showed they are full of deceit and perversion. There is nothing self-evident in philosophy. It is exactly this that incites it to always recreate itself. Even if the ground beneath our feet moves continually while we think it into being, it is a ground nevertheless, not an infinite abyss. Deleuze’s ungrounding is antifoundationalist but not nihilist. Neither is it a return to the naiveté of empiricism or vitalism (I think because I sense, because I live). Championing immanence means that thinking is immanent to its ground. Thinking is not directly determined by the ground, earth, or matter. The earth is present at the beginning as a problematic genetic field that thinking actively and messily deals with. If for the German-Idealist tradition philosophy’s immanence means that thought is intrinsically limited by the groundedness in its own categories and laws (Kant) or absence (Heidegger), for Deleuze thought surfs along spacetime as the realm of infinite plasticity. “The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to ‘get into something’ instead of being the origin of an effort” (N 121). Philosophy is not driven by a spark of the divine but the immanent ground already contains or refracts the productivity of the rest of the universe. This sounds mystical again, but we’ll see how Deleuze remains heir to the Kantian and Copernican Revolutions. After Deleuze the task is to make the ground of thinking ever more literal and forceful, ever more spatial.

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Geo-philosophy If philosophy is defined as the creation of concepts, geophilosophy is the name Deleuze gives at the end of his life to the creation of concepts as more-than-human and emergent from “the earth.” Geophilosophy is sometimes the name given for Deleuze and Guattari’s brand of materialism itself (Bonta and Protevi 2004, Antonioli 2004, Saldanha 2006), but it is not always clear what is meant by geo and the earth. When Nietzsche wrote about “staying true to the earth” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1961: 42), he recast the biblical earth metaphor as what needs to be reaffirmed against some 2,000 years of Platonic, Christian, and rationalist faith in various species of heaven. Deleuze’s project is similarly to affirm immanence, to critique this world in all its violent intractability. Geophilosophy is therefore first of all a synonym for post-Kantian immanentism, and geo- is a metaphor. However, as Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly cite the geographic history or geohistory of Fernand Braudel (1973) as an influence, we can productively enlarge the scope of what geophilosophy can be. As a dynamic system the planet continuously, and often ominously, ungrounds itself (see Clark 2014). It is this vortex of matter and energy that thinking after Deleuze tries to map. If concepts do not fall from above one of the responsibilities of the philosopher is to examine how concepts sprout within specific spatiotemporal conditions. Hence Nietzsche, whom Deleuze and Guattari credit as inventor of geophilosophy (WP 102), asked how the psychocultural soils of France, England, and Germany produced their respective philosophies, much like Deleuze would later ask of national cinemas. This threatens to be an essentialist exercise only if we don’t put deterritorialization first. Similarly, Deleuze doesn’t inquire into the extent to which a creativity belongs to a nation, a place, but, on the contrary, into how a thinker, artist, or visionary comes to escape a geosocial formation’s habits and conservative tendencies. Elsewhere in Deleuze’s work the earth is not simply the context, soil, or territory from which creativity deterritorializes itself, but deterritorialization itself. It is the all-encompassing Body-withoutOrgans, all of life before its organization, which Anti-Oedipus theorizes as preceding all economic production and distinguishes from “ground” in the sense of soil:

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The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production. For the earth is not merely the multiple and divided object of labor, it is also the unique, indivisible entity, the full body [without organs] that falls back on the forces of production and appropriates them for its own as the natural or divine precondition. While the ground can be the productive element and the result of appropriation, the Earth is the great unengendered stasis, the element superior to production that conditions the common appropriation and utilization of the ground. AO 140–41 We come back to the body-without-organs in Chapter 3. Here we should note that in Anti-Oedipus the earth is both the basis of the “primitive” mode of production and that which every mode of production continues to presuppose as a virtual realm of what is possible on this planet. Anti-Oedipus points towards a “universal history” of how the earth, in the common sense of immense physical sphere of interconnected flows of matter and energy, came to bear its most productive and destructive system, capitalism. A key question for modern historiography like that of Braudel is why the emergence of capitalism occurred in northern England. Likewise one question driving Deleuze later in life is why thinking for the sake of thinking emerged in Greece. How did some port cities bring forth a new kind of rigorous conversation and friendship, a love of wisdom (philia + sophia), an abstraction not linked to the verticalities of the state and public worship? A Hegel or a Heidegger understands the Greek philosophy-event as a quasi-miraculous flash of cultural ingenuity inaugurating a progressive development culminating in their own interventions (WP 94). Deleuze and Guattari take issue with such Eurocentric self-congratulation. The birth of philosophy is not a point but a confluence. One post-Deleuzian project is to describe geographies within which new concepts can precariously take hold. Such geographies are deterritorializations more than determinations: sea routes, currencies, letters, gods, camels, and earthquakes, like Lisbon’s in 1755. A social milieu is productive of thinking by virtue of its internal heterogeneity: “The birth of philosophy required an encounter between the Greek milieu and the plane of immanence of thought” (WP 93). We will elaborate on what Deleuze means by “plane of

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immanence” later, but for now let us define it as reality’s bottomline chaotic edge that pushes novelty. To start with, Greeks spoke an Indo-European language and used technologies they hadn’t invented (including their alphabet). Many early philosophers were strangers to the places they worked. Greeks had wealth and spare time thanks to trade and slavery. Philosophy emerged thanks to intellectual exchange with Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia, the “oriental empires,” which were said to constrain all intellectual innovation. Deleuze and Guattari could have noted that the very notion of oriental despotism emerged at this time. They say it is the “fractal” nature of the eastern Mediterranean basin that made these scatterings and minglings possible (87). Hence when Deleuze and Guattari ask “What is thought’s relationship with the earth?” (69), we can take them to ask a very straightforward question, perhaps the most concrete question possible. The history of ideas and traditional universal history implies a seemingly necessary movement from one period or stage to another, each of which is explicable through its conditions. The geography of events proposed by Deleuze and Guattari holds instead that innovation cannot be reduced to places, individuals, or causes: “Geography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency. It wrests it from the cult of origins in order to affirm the power of a ‘milieu’ ” (WP 96). There is necessarily a leap between geographical conditions and the newness emerging from and through them: this leap is the encounter between milieu and the plane of immanence. However, Deleuze and Guattari do not escape a certain geographical parochialism: “Only the West extends and propagates its centers of immanence” (WP 97). Of course other civilizations reach the plane of immanence, but they are merely “prephilosophical” (93). In Asia, what Deleuze and Guattari call “figures” – myths, ritual objects like mandalas – prevent the formulation of genuine concepts since these should escape from religion and law. Figures are social cement while concepts are intrinsically critical of society, cosmopolitan and oriented towards the future. As condensing encounters with milieus traversing social formations, concepts tend to be universalizing. It is true that philosophy outside Europe remains largely tethered to theophany. But strong concepts of immanence exist in Islam, Daoism, Buddhism, and so on, and as Anti-Oedipus shows echoing Lévi-Strauss, even more so amongst “primitives” and

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nomads. The geographical biases (Eurocentricity) of the very definitions of thinking and civilization have been thoroughly critiqued since Lévi-Strauss. But the question remains how to make systems of thought resonate. By raising the question of non-European thought, Deleuze and Guattari show they are at least aware the Greek miracle must itself be questioned without however losing the European penchant for demythologization and revolution. Today capitalism and the liberal public sphere have diffused from Europe across the earth. To construct concepts and to “propagate immanence” has therefore become a critical necessity in almost every social formation. Unlike for Nietzsche and rather like for Kant, Deleuzian immanence means inserting philosophy into a broader collective movement to create a new world, a different globalization. Under liberal democracy, ruled as it is by opinions and factoids, there is a directly political dimension of producing concepts that now might be more urgent than ever before. Concepts work for Deleuze if they jam the circuits of capital and democracy and produce noncapitalist collectivities and environments. “Philosophy takes the relative deterritorialization of capital to the absolute; it makes it pass over the plane of immanence as movement to the infinite and suppresses it as internal limit, turns it back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people” (WP 99). Capital deterritorializes peoples and ideas only relatively, that is, only to reterritorialize them onto the profit motive. What has since Marx been called communism has always been thought as building upon capital’s unmooring and universalization. While it is not clear what turning capital “against itself” might mean, we can broadly conclude that for geophilosophy the invention of a radically new way of life and society eschews any return to tradition or premodern earth.

Strata Stratoanalysis is only one of the many names Deleuze and Guattari give to their critical method: “rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities” (ATP 43). A first requirement for understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of the spatiality of heterogeneous connection is that these names are not entirely interchangeable, as

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each gives its own emphasis. By conceptualizing layered change stratoanalysis offers a four-dimensional spatiality commensurate with planetary processes more readily than the cognate terms. For conceptualizing the more-than-human temporal and spatial scales of globalization the concept of stratification is indispensable. It is also unique in philosophy.

Geologies Why are Deleuze and Guattari drawn to physical geography? For example, why does it make perfect sense for Deleuze (ECC 146) to think Spinoza’s Ethics (1996) is a “great and continuous fluvial chain” interrupted by a subterranean activity of volcanic fire? Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre is littered with foldings and flows, striations and strata, sediments and superimpositions, planes and plateaus, volcanoes and crystals, seas and islands, fault lines and cracks. They make geology plural. In presenting an unfathomably ancient ground for existence, earth science provincializes human temporal cycles and eschatologies, including those of the great monotheistic and imperial traditions (see Zalasiewicz 2009). There have been many ends of worlds. In the big picture, as it is said, the end of Western civilization or humankind barely matters. Plate tectonics presents groundedness itself as continually transforming, occasionally in sudden violent jolts but mostly imperceptibly slow. Humans don’t sit comfortably atop a metaphysical pyramid. Rather than abyssal, an Abgrund, being is itself always already stratified, and there is always another stratum traversing what we thought was sturdy. Stratal differentiation goes all the way down to the solid inner core (which exists, interestingly, at roughly the same temperature as the sun’s surface, 6,000°C). The planet’s landmasses and oceans are shaped by its infernal innards but also by gravitation, radiation, and bombardments from outer space. After Deleuze and Guattari earth science can become complete, that is critical, when it conceives human cultural evolution, capitalism, and earth science itself as precipitated by, or at least responding to, the ultra-slow movements of plates, mountains, oceans, and fossilization. We saw that Deleuze is fascinated by the fact that Greek philosophy emerged along the fractal Eastern Mediterranean basin, where Africa smashes into Europe and the

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Middle East. Similarly, industrial capitalism surfaced amid the coalfields of England. Furthermore, earth science can learn much from Deleuze and Guattari’s peculiar use of the term geology. Their “geological” approach (like the geohistory of Braudel) does not reduce social formations and historical ruptures to the deeper stratal conditions that they disturb. In short, the Anthropocene necessitates conversations amongst stratigraphy, environmental studies, evolutionary theory, political economy, and the humanities, and many of Deleuze and Guattari’s intuitions will be of great help. In plateau 3 of A Thousand Plateaus titled “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?,” the layered way of understanding processes helps Deleuze and Guattari extend the critical method of Nietzsche and Foucault’s analyses of power/ knowledge (Foucault 1977 and 2003) onto a larger canvas. Genealogy in its usual sense of family trees is the pompous recording of (mostly) patrilineal descent and aristocratic purity. “There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the people” (ATP 8). In its Nietzschean and Foucauldian senses, however, genealogy is the prying open of such claims to origin, tradition, and rectitude. Though critiquing morality and the family is also Deleuze and Guattari’s aim, their rhizomatic method (unlike a tree, a rhizome grows laterally and locally) mobilizes a much larger range of biological and physical processes, from a perspective closer to actual human populations, to the masses. “The rhizome is an antigenealogy” (ATP 21). Deleuze–Guattarian geology or rhizomatics replaces the genealogical emphasis on time and kinship (succession, branching, lineage) with an emphasis on space and disruption (layers, vectors, deterritorialization). Strata and stratification have been basic metaphors in sociology, especially Marxism. Elaborating Freud, Guattari had long used it as metaphor for the layers of the unconscious and of social machines (see MR 150–51). But the term becomes fully literal in A Thousand Plateaus in order to obtain a general ontology of dynamic composition. Admittedly plateau 3 contains less geology and morals than biology and signs. Even if its starting point is indeed the earth, work is still to be done to bring it in conversation with geological science. It is telling that not Charles Lyell, the English geologist, but Louis Hjelmslev, “the Danish Spinozist geologist” (ATP 43, a joke, he is a linguist) provides the plateau’s overall framework. If the earth is a giant body without organs, a massive

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machine circulating chaotic intensities without the overall integration of an organism, it necessarily produces “accumulations, coagulations, sedimentations, foldings” (ATP 502). Such spatial organization is both horizontal, along planes and over territories, and vertical, through stratification. Some strata are superficial and rapid; some profound and ultra-slow (what is called “deep” time). The trick is to grasp the hierarchies. In a more complex manner than in the traditional base-superstructure model of Marxism, for Deleuze and Guattari the earth’s economy subtends all forms that live on it, including human knowledge, by continuing to persist out of their complete grasp, as a continuing primordial chaos. Now, the earth is continuously changing. It is something like the famous prebiotic soup that logically and chemically existed before life formed. But the Deleuzian earth is not “before” life: it persists, and each life form is continually changing its composition. A social formation emerges through stratification, through fixing and encoding the “pre”-biotic soup. Strata are acts of capture, they are like “black holes” or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach. They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality. The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized). ATP 40 This passage shows nicely how Deleuze–Guattarian style jumps disciplines and scales. If their notion of strata owes more to biology than to geology, Deleuze and Guattari recast the former in the terms of the latter. First, as a layer or conveyor belt, a stratum cannot exist without physically drawing in adjacent flows, which it then occludes. Any stabilization and growth, whether of a monolith, a psyche, a species, or an empire (all strata for Deleuze and Guattari), is a selfpropelling and creative folding-in of its surroundings. Second, the earth as such always exceeds its stratifications. “Stratification is like the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation” (ATP 502). Strata always leak, fold back on, and start dismantling themselves, but tend to prevent any deeper change. One could say

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strata are neurotic. This passage adopts a quasi-metaphor that Guattari used in his psychotherapy, black holes, the abysses of anxiety and fear where humans get sucked into fixity (MR 148–50). Third, stratifications happen by virtue of coding flows (giving them functions and meanings) and territorializing them (giving them a place, very literally, within a system). For example, the fossil fuel industry is a stratum grabbing and selling flows of gas and oil. It is based on shady contracts, petrochemistry, and price mechanisms (coding), as well as aggressive usurpation and distribution and socioeconomic disparities (territorialization). Even inorganic stratifications like crystallization or climate require a kind of encoding in the shape of information, though it does seem Deleuze– Guattari’s concept of code works better for organic and human strata. Fourth, and finally, to humans strata seem like divine judgments, as if they are based on a transcendent and infallible authority (embodied in the elders, priestly caste, invincible mining lobby). An illusion of transcendence holds the entire system together. To the mere mortals living them, strata seem to offer no way out, as if they are black holes. Stratification happens through “double articulation.” A stratum consists of two pincers like a lobster: “God is a lobster” (ATP 40; a lobster also adorns the plateau’s first page). Guattari radicalizes the fourfold table (substance/form, content/expression) which Hjelmslev introduced to study the semiotic working of matter. The result is a typology of material-semiotic processes that proliferate extravagantly in the late Guattari (especially SC ). What is important is that a stratum emerges solely from the selection and condensation of particles of a different scale or order, and is immediately available for stratification on yet another level: “Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum” (ATP 72). Historical formations like the prison complex can be fruitfully reconceptualized as “sedimentary beds,” as Deleuze does in his book on Foucault (F 47). The first articulation of a stratum takes place on the plane of content to yield both a “form of content” (for example, the prison as such, a social machine interacting with others like school and army and consisting of a certain utilitarian “visibility” in the form of the famous panopticon) and an aggregate of “substances of content” (the prison’s physical components like the prisoner bodies themselves, the building, guns, clock). The second articulation is on the plane of expression and yields both a “form of expression”

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(penal law as what Foucault calls a discursive practice, within a certain field of “sayability”) and “substances of expression” (delinquency as a mass of statements and practices; compare with ATP 66–67). We will see in Chapter 4 that a system of strata is also organized through a diagram or abstract machine, which enables it to compose itself and propagate. Deleuze and Guattari say their geological approach stands “in radical opposition to the scenario of the signifier. A form of content is not a signified, any more than a form of expression is a signifier. This is true for all the strata, including those on which language plays a role” (ATP 66). If Guattari’s appropriation of Hjelmslev’s linguistics may be a bit too strained to be of general use (what does the semiological fourfold look like when studying inert gases?), it is primarily meant to direct earthly philosophy away from the idealism of the linguistic turn. This amounts to giving it a keener sense of space and milieus. Stratoanalysis would not consider the “social construction” of race, for example, as a question of stereotypical and ambivalent signifiers, but would ask how particular phenotypes become agglutinated to act as conduits for the money stratum (racial division of labor), disease vectors (genocide of indigenous Americans), nutritional components (soul food), musical strata (jazz), and so on. There is certainly a kind of differentiation like in semiotics but instead of meaning, a Deleuze–Guattarian stratigraphy of race will talk of the double articulation of forces. The geology plateau makes a distinction between three basic megastrata: the physicochemical, the organic, and the anthropomorphic. Conventional enough, what allows this distinction is not a priori essences or even level of complexity but the way content relates to expression. On the physicochemical or inorganic stratum, expression can only be a jump in scale. Particles accumulate and resonate to express a new entity at a bigger scale, as happens in a crystal (ATP 57). The organic stratum has a different kind of articulation. In life emergence happens across all scales from amino acids to ecosystems. Expressivity becomes autonomous from the material input (content), enabling all the irreversible chemical processes we think of as life: reproduction, ingestion, energy transport and storage, perception, evolution (on irreversibility see Prigogine and Stengers 1984). There is a “threshold of deterritorialization” separating an organism from a crystal: a crystal is constrained by its territory while life is intrinsically mobile (ATP

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59–60). Deleuzian materialism has to be wary, however, of vitalism. Biological emergence does not contradict the laws of physics, and “there is no vital matter specific to the organic stratum, matter is the same on all the strata” (ATP 45). Finally, the human or alloplastic (“molded otherwise”) stratum derives from a redistribution and concentration of the other megastrata. Hands are deterritorialized paws (ATP 61). Typing, they express digital codes that are still more deterritorialized. These codes set in motion an atomic bomb, which then entirely rearranges the organic and inorganic strata from which limbs had evolved. While all mammals and birds exhibit phenotypic and behavioral plasticity it is especially in humans that materialities are deterritorialized so that surroundings are “overcoded,” notably through that most expressive of processes, language. “The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are fully part of that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their pincers out in all directions at all the other strata” (ATP 63). Capitalism is the megamachine for unprecedented interpenetration of strata, and the Anthropocene or the geological activity of the human species is the most extensive allopasticity of the planet’s life. Deleuze’s “system of strata” is a unique contribution to thinking the earth without anthropocentrism yet from the vantage point of a species that has irretrievably changed its milieu and life chances. Against theological or theosophical notions of a cosmic evolution reaching its pinnacle in man, Deleuze stresses strata are not stages. No stratum is “higher” or more perfect than another. Astrophysics is not more fundamental than embryology or aesthetics. In concluding, we should not think Deleuze and Guattari seek to vilify stability or naturalize anarchy: “we cannot content ourselves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency” (ATP 70). Though they privilege the liberation of desire away from strata and back into the immanence of the earth, they also point out that intentional destratification usually ends in failure, or worse, fascism and psychosis. This warning is often cited: Every undertaking of destratification (for example, going beyond the organism, plunging into a becoming) must therefore observe concrete rules of extreme caution: a too-sudden destratification may be suicidal, or turn cancerous. In other words, it will

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sometimes end in chaos, the void and destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata, which become more rigid still, losing their degree of diversity, differentiation, and mobility. ATP 503 Insofar as it presents the constructedness of human social formations at time-scales from the geological to the cybernetic, stratoanalysis is immediately political. The concept of strata is revolutionary in providing a geological critique of all questions moral, but it also understands God’s judgments are not so easily overturned.

Phyla The concept of machinic phylum is important in holding Deleuzian stratigraphy together by discovering a generative movement cutting through all the strata. In taxonomy the phylum (meaning “race,” “tribe”) comes between the class and the kingdom. For example, the animal kingdom consists of thirty-five phyla, including arthropods, molluscs, and a humiliating number of phyla of worms. The class of mammals is in the phylum Chordata. Biologists talk of phylogenesis (or speciation) as opposed to ontogenesis (or individual development). While the timescale of biological phyla is of the order of thousands and millions of years, the “phyla” Deleuze and Guattari talk about are much more particular: lines or lineages of technological, especially metallurgical, propensity, stitching together vast empires like the Sumerian and Chinese (we return to lines in Chapter 3). Their phylum is machinic and runs across and feeds all three megastrata. As such it completes the theory of strata. Proposition VIII in the war-machine plateau states: “Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism” (ATP 404). Building on archeology, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the geography of empire coincides with the geographies of metal ores, blacksmiths, horses, and military innovation, all associated with nomads. The “machinic phylum” is what constructs a state: “the phylum simultaneously has two different modes of liaison: it is always connected to nomad space, whereas it conjugates with sedentary space” (ATP 409). The relatively rigid spatiality of an empire depends, then, on capturing the most deterritorialized vector in it, the war-machines of warriors, merchants, and miners. There is

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a physical geography of singularities or haecceities (see Chapter 3) that has accumulated in rocks, which nomads have learnt to follow and profit from, just like transhumance does with pasture. The machinic phylum includes not merely the earth’s layers, veins, and gradients but the social formations that local strata make possible, and the sometimes esoteric capacity to collaborate with these variations (the macrogeography of mineral veins connects to the microgeography of smelting). In other words, “the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only be followed” (ATP 409). However, Deleuze and Guattari go beyond archeology in that one cannot comprehensively map how a phylum sutures an imperial assemblage that captures it. A phylum is not knowable, only thinkable. The metallic line is not the only machinic phylum. It seems that any phenomenon crossing from the geophysical to the technological and aesthetic strata should be considered a phylum, a trans-stratal creativity. Hence the refrain plateau, while theorizing the ways that assemblages necessarily cross through strata, also mentions “a machinic phylum, a destratifying transversality, moved through elements, orders, forms and substances, the molar and the molecular, freeing a matter and tapping forces” (ATP 335). Music is nothing less than the resonance of strata. The machinic phylum of music – sound does not represent but literally embodies the atmo-, litho-, and biospheres (wind through wood, vibrating skins, silicon in synthesizers) – makes it “infinitely more powerful” than the other arts (ATP 348). Music attracts both teenagers and nationalists, rapture and slaughter. Sound owes this power not to signifying or “communicational” values (which on the contrary presuppose that power), nor to physical properties (which would privilege light over sound), but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not happen without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to die. ATP 348

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In Deleuzian stratigraphy it becomes possible to connect the most ethereal strata like music or philosophy to the most basic strata of minerals. Machinic phyla and extraction are objective facets of all societies. Deleuze and Guattari are fascinated by how traveling metalworkers and musicians trace the earth but constantly remind us how they are from the beginning also reterritorialized by those in power. Stratoanalysis is always a politics. In the capitalist present we can analyze the phyla of coal, petroleum, cobalt, and other geopoliticized deposits, each a highly unevenly distributed matter-flow inducing its own war-machines and mythologies. The geologized view of Deleuze and Guattari holds that flows of capital and labor are required to harness any phylum and no economic and political geography is understandable outside its imbrication with the accidents of the litho- and hydrospheres. Any resistance against national or imperial stratal rigidities has to plug itself into lessthan-human layers: “an ‘ideological’, scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to a phylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement” (ATP 422). This necessity for politics to plant itself into earthly phyla has become even more obvious now than in Deleuze’s life. The Anthropocene is a global reality that, of all philosophical works, A Thousand Plateaus comes closest to providing an ontological framework for. Or, the Anthropocene can be called a profoundly Deleuzian epoch (Clark 2014). Atmospheric and oceanic strata respond in excessive and unpredictable ways to a particularly violent appropriation of water, fossil fuels, metals, sand, salt, and so on. This relentless extraction has been fundamental to capitalism. The hubris of the efforts of the anthropic stratum to see itself as separate and above the other strata (man masters nature) comes crashing down as the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the corresponding higher retention of solar heat is making the effects of all inter-stratal processes (like earthquakes and tsunamis) ever more catastrophic. In merely two centuries man finds himself not at a Promethean pinnacle, but more enslaved and befuddled than ever before by the geophysical and agro-ecological strata which he thought he had conquered. As seen in the speeding up of extraction through suburban sprawl, fracking, tourism, and smart cities, and in the incapacity of governments and publics to conjure alternatives, capitalism everywhere continues to hold on to a

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disastrous course. Deleuze and Guattari would wholeheartedly agree with many of today’s climate justice activists but reconnect with the Marxist critique. Since it is the uncontrollable selforganizing machinism of capital that has been madly ploughing through the machinic phyla and keeping humans addicted to oil, humanity’s objective can only be to dismantle it.

Mechanosphere Mechanosphere is a neologism Guattari uses occasionally to talk about the earth insofar as it feeds into every machinic assemblage. Machinic assemblages (spatiotemporal systems like education, or one particular school), abstract machines (their virtual organization), and collective assemblages of enunciation (language in its pragmatic dimension) remain attached to the mechanosphere as with an umbilical cord. “Every living being, every process of enunciation, every psychic instance, and every social formation is necessarily connected (machinically enslaved) to a crossroad-point between, on the one hand, its particular position on the objective phylum of concrete machines and, on the other, the attachment of its formula of existence on the plane of consistency of abstract machines” (MU 192). The mechanosphere is something like the plane of all the abstract machines or possibilities of connection of our planet. It is important to understand why Guattari uses the suffix -sphere. The suffix became indispensable as the earth sciences matured in the nineteenth century (stratosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere), and again as globalization becomes conscious of itself (noosphere, infosphere, technosphere, blogosphere . . .). Central to the discussion here, and decisive for Anthropocene politics, is whether the sphericality converges onto some kind of vital or spiritual whole. The term appears in the geology plateau: “What we call the mechanosphere is the set of all abstract machines and machinic assemblages outside the strata, on the strata, or between strata” (ATP 71). The mechanosphere is the plane, both virtual and actual, on and through which all human systems and their possibilities are organized (we return to planes in Chapter  3). Assemblages are terrestrial, biological, technical, and desiring, and the mechanosphere does not belong to any one stratum but is necessarily involved in

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any connecting of strata. It is the immense accumulative repository of possible inter-stratal penetration. The geology plateau ends with “ – the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere” (ATP 74). What characterizes the mechanosphere is the same quasi-infinite nonhierarchical and proliferating connectivity that Deleuze and Guattari associate with rhizomatic plants (plateau 1 is called “Rhizome”). And A Thousand Plateaus closes with this very term: “Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic – perceptive, affective, thinking, physical, and semiotic – but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere” (ATP 514). It seems this is a concept holding the theory of strata, territories, and assemblages together insofar as they necessarily are subtended by it; that is, it is more or less synonymous with the virtual side of earth itself, its body without organs. But why is there need to conceptualize this ultimate horizon? The term is meant to criticize the prevailing depoliticizing tendencies reintroducing transcendence into discourses on life and world-history, which have only become worse since the neoliberal and new age 1980s. When Deleuze and Guattari write, “There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere” (ATP 69), they are speaking as committed materialists. It is important to think politics together with science. The interconnectedness of life at the planetary scale, including satellites and ocean cables and global warming, does not warrant holistic interpretations of the organic stratum as happens in Gaia theory. Deleuze and Guattari want to emphasize the fragmented, frictional, automatic, or even mechanical nature of the biosphere and globalization. Like lava, like cog wheels, strata always already interlock, but they do not form unified spheres with their own impetus towards some divine apex of complexity. So instead of the planetary shell of togetherness and the preordained cosmic destiny of Gaia theory, Deleuze and Guattari suggest a return within and beyond vitalism to mechanics, to science without religion, in order to revive materialism without reductionism but also without dialectics. They share with early twentieth-century vitalist philosophies like Bergson’s an appreciation of the crucial roles of ecological interdependence in the evolution and metabolism of the human species. Species and strata are irreducible: ultimately no stratum or species can claim ontological precedence, and the

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anthropic stratum is temporally and spatially insignificant to the rest of the universe. Deleuze rejects the notion of an overarching telos like “noosphere” (from the popular Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), or some all-encompassing One, which would guide the nitty-gritty of biological and mental processes towards it (a tendency in the concept of “biosphere” proposed by the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky). Life has to be thought as emergent from contingent encounter and creativity at every turn. It cannot be one seamlessly unified force characterized by an ineffable Bergsonian élan vital (life impetus). Life for Deleuze is traversed by its substrata, by entropy, illness, dissipation, the dead and the death drive. Substituting mechano- for bio- is therefore meant to pull the carpet from under any mystical attempt at totalizing terrestrial life as a separate eternal, foundational, and teleological stratum. For Deleuze life is exactly what forestalls identity and wholeness, what keeps bodies and populations dis-organized, generative, and discordant. Moreover, there is a strong desire for transcendence and centralization intrinsic to the concept of sphere, which Deleuze wants to avoid. But as heir to Kant, Deleuze does not believe that dissolving the anthropic stratum in the rest of space and time makes any ethical sense. Life is fundamentally given over to chance. The human species is not in the least on a linear path to perfection. As we can see with the Anthropocene it is in fact making its own extinction ever more likely. If the mechanosphere subsumes all assemblages and strata, how does it differ from the term nature? Deleuze uses this vaguest of terms rarely, and mostly when discussing others like Spinoza, Rousseau, and Lucretius. Many have critiqued the ideological connotations of the term, which go back to Neoplatonic Christianity, Romanticism, and German philosophies of nature, connotations that continue to reverberate today in environmentalism and ecotourism (see Smith 2008). Attempts to “return to nature” easily land up in absurdity (is plastic not made of fossilized life?) or microfascism (nudism under the Nazis). The nature concept is an essential product of Europe’s obsession with transcendence, while Deleuze and Guattari’s work continually undermines the dualistic and totalizing tendencies of Western philosophy as found in binaries like nature/culture, natural/artificial, things/words, and body/mind. As their chief metaphysician they choose Spinoza, for whom

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humans are fully “part of” nature. Spinoza’s critique of transcendence is radical: God is not out there, “he” is literally the same thing as nature (Deus sive natura), and we express him insofar as we live according to our specific and changing nature. In modernity, nature accrues all the theological connotations that the critiques of transcendence of Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud aim to get rid of. As the contributions of Deleuze to anti-foundationalist ontology show, he has no need for a concept of nature at all. It is similar with man. Grounding thought in the immanence of the earth has to avoid the reintroduction of a hierophanic operation orienting thought towards the sky. For Deleuze, if humanism including Kant and phenomenology succeeded in emancipating thought from religion, a desire for sacredness continues to exist within it: secularism means bestowing sacrality on man himself and/or his technological prowess (witness the utopian exhilaration around the internet). Paradoxically, wilderness and the supposed natural equilibrium that man has destroyed at the same time also become sacred. GOD = NATURE = MAN . The intrinsic piety of the nature and man concepts derives from the fact that its totalizing gesture first requires centering the thinking subject in privileged relation to a supposed exterior panorama. For Deleuze, as we saw, there is only the continuous self-ungrounding movement of differences. Space and time are multiplicities all the way “down” and “up,” which by virtue of their very movement prevent the coherence of a cosmic finality and unicity. Deleuze and Guattari’s frequent references to capitalized terms like Earth, Life, Mechanosphere, Plane of Immanence, Chaosmos, and even the One-All (WP 35) are meant to piggyback on an existing rhetorical force, but only in order to undermine totalization. Like all philosophers they need abstract terms. More specifically, in order to reach a renewed concept of immanence against idealism it is critical to put everything on the same ontological level. Deleuze revives a principle of heretic medieval metaphysics called univocity for which all beings are in the same manner, de jure so to speak, even if they are de facto distributed and layered differently (DR 35ff). What Deleuzian univocity means for thinking space is that every being posits itself in the same way, utterly contingently and singularly. There is no serene overall plan to which it would answer, and beings do not emanate from one divine substance or perspective. Deleuze’s materialist univocity jettisons the One-All precisely by

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making difference its first principle, by equating being with becoming. Alain Badiou (1999) is probably correct that Deleuzian immanentism should have engaged the modern theorization of mathematical infinity to completely avoid the ideological traps of mysticism. Still, the overall fidelity of Deleuze and Guattari to the critical and Marxian projects cannot be doubted. Their materialist difference takes precedence on any lapse into mystical oneness. This adherence to revolution and atheism sharply distinguishes their ontology from all prior vitalists and immanentist theologians, raising the question of whether we should classify them as vitalist at all. After Deleuze the distinctly European concepts of transcendent nature and life can be replaced with a theory of strata, flows, and phyla, which only works if there is no ultimate ground or law ordering them from and to eternity. Though they appear only occasionally in the corpus of Deleuze and Guattari, the concepts of machinic phylum and mechanosphere can be considered their prescient terms for an age when the human is no longer in control of a nonhuman realm supposedly outside it. The Anthropocene is nothing but the abrupt reordering of strata against the smug expectations that millennia of civilization have ingrained in those in power. The Anthropocene is an entanglement and confrontation of radically different temporalities. Now capable of plunging the strata of consciousness and politics into disastrous breakdown, there is a direct imperative to reinvigorate materialist perspectives.

Plateaus “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus” (ATP 22). While the botanical metaphor of rhizome has been duly discussed as a key image of the lateral and transversal logic of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, less commented on is the question of why a geological term was chosen for the chapters of A Thousand Plateaus. Like all of Deleuze’s terms, it is half-literal, not a mere metaphor. It does not come directly from geomorphology but from Gregory Bateson, the eclectic anthropologist crucial to Guattari’s thinking on machines, cybernetics, and schizophrenia. Though fairly close to the U.S. mainstream, Bateson’s speculative “ecology

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of mind” (1972) critiqued transcendence and reductionism and helped early Guattari formulate his own semiotic ontology (MR 88–90). “Plateau” was in use in psychology for describing preorgasmic excitation when Bateson uses it briefly, and lightly, to reinterpret the ways affects like fondness and aggression become organized in Balinese culture (1972: 112–113). Instead of a divided social structure as Marxists might see, Bateson argues that intense “cumulative” or self-reinforcing behavior is carefully controlled through the culturally specific rules of the agents who are engaged in it. In analogy with a thermostat, participants of sexual play, quarrels, or trance dance will ride a wave of intensity, a positive feedback loop, without letting the system collapse. This is a plateau. For Bateson such restraint in excess is fundamental to social formations. There has to be a precariously maintained continuity in time as much as an extensive organization and modeling of bodies. Plateaus are moreover extremely place-specific: sex, games, and violence happen only somewhere. This interplay of intensity with extension, or time with space, is crucial in Deleuze and Guattari’s redefinition of plateau: “We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (ATP 22). A Thousand Plateaus is itself their best example. A conventional book of philosophy consists of chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, letters, and punctuation. Everything is ordered hierarchically along one programmed direction like a tree. “What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain?” (22). A Thousand Plateaus is a rhizome, a network maintaining itself intensively like prairie grass, forming a kind of unity only through the fact there are little “synaptic” spaces gaping within it, across which new connections have to be made continually for the coherence to maintain itself. What takes place in such a book is an in-folding of its outside, of the real world. A Thousand Plateaus consists of almost arbitrarily sequenced plateaus, with their own philosophical foci and weird dates constantly cross-pollinating. A book is something to inhabit, an environment rather than a ladder. Instead of a beginning and end already contained in the beginning like in the classical novel, there is only a middle (un milieu), or many middles. Furthermore, instead of layers of meaning, Deleuze and Guattari’s books present style, argument, and interpretation as

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one series of gestures. There is no esoteric stratum or hermeneutic nugget to unearth and conquer, only various planes of rapid superficial connections to browse and pick from. There is definitely an intelligence proper to rhizomatic connecting – isn’t the brain itself a dense network without beginning or end? – but it is suppressed in arborescent, stratified society. In the concept of plateau there is also the unexpected encounter between geological and psychoanalytic thinking. Deleuze was interested in the perversions from early on, like in “Description of Woman”, written as an undergraduate, and especially in his essay on masochism, Coldness and Cruelty. This is because in perversity intensity is maintained against a dominant genital economy directed at release (orgasm) and defined objects. In later critiquing psychoanalysis with Guattari, Deleuze understands the need and glorification of pleasure as part of heterosexual normalization, that is general neurosis, which the desires of the pervert and the psychotic rebel against. A masochist develops a body-without-organs and a “continuous process of desire which pleasure, on the contrary, would come and interrupt” (D 101). The masochist assemblage maintains itself on a plateau by ignoring the need for culmination, recognition, or redemption. We will return to desire and bodies in Chapter 3. As usual Deleuze and Guattari overstate their case for stylistic effect. A Thousand Plateaus has some tree-like order, of course. The methodological question is how order is swept up by chaos to form a new kind of philosophical consistency not found elsewhere. Also, the export of “plateau” from Bateson’s psycho-ethnographic observations to a more-than-metaphorical geological trope for the very act of arranging and reading philosophy (and its resemblance to neuronal structure) might seem unjustified. Whereas plateau in Bateson is singular, phasic (the level between climax and normality) and “self-corrective,” plateaus in A Thousand Plateaus are numerous (fifteen or a thousand?), meant to intermingle, and do not belong to one cultural system. But the question with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts is never whether their borrowing is fair or accurate but whether it allows for thinking afresh. Their entire transdisciplinary vocabulary demonstrates an appreciation of the rhizomatic potentials usually frowned upon in the distribution of concepts, affects, and percepts called disciplines. Lastly, the connection the term plateau draws between geophilosophy, violence, and sexuality gives an ethical twist.

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Philosophizing occurs not by directly penetrating through strata and phyla but by traversing a plateau between immanence and generality and allowing its lessons to percolate and proliferate. Some relationship with the illusions of ground, with end-points (objectives) and starting-points (axioms) is necessary, or one will get mired in quicksand. The plateau concept can therefore conceivably keep us from reading A Thousand Plateaus as simply anarcho-vitalist wherein anything goes and any “new” connection is better than none. The ethical challenge is to gain coherence at the edge of nonsense and chaos. So the machinic, stratoanalytical, and other methods in A Thousand Plateaus are more than simple eclecticism. They can inspire researchers to sketch their own map of trajectories for responding to real-world problems whose relevance does not come from communing with a scientific Truth, a transcendent plane of Nature, a regional tradition, or a revolutionary telos. On Deleuze and Guattari’s topological and critical approach to philosophy, forming relevant concepts for earthly politics has to happen by collectively working with and through the plateaus of life – which can only be understood across the petty boundaries constructed between research areas.

Geocommunism The more the rhizomatic approach to the domains of knowledge spreads, the more it becomes possible for the social and physical sciences to speak directly to each other, and the more there could be a viable politics for the Anthropocene. It is telling, however, that many readers have side-lined the more subversive and creative foci of the work of Deleuze, Deleuze–Guattari, and Guattari: capital, schizophrenia, repression, war, institutions, addiction, environmental destruction, revolution. Of course, all of these are intensely spatial processes. Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are perfectly clear that their target is the insane logic that affects almost all flows of the human species, namely capital’s ever-expanding parasitic system, which might be bringing globalization to its final self-destructive phase. The Anthropocene means capital’s selfdestructiveness is more catastrophic than even Marx and Deleuze– Guattari imagined. This chapter will end by asking whether politics after Deleuze can meet the terrible socioecological reality of the

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Anthropocene. If capital and our planet are so tightly integrated, what room is there for organizing a world without capital? “We just used words that in turn function for us as plateaus. RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS ” (ATP 2). But does the twentyfirst century not require a grander politics, in both scale and ambition, than what Deleuze and Guattari offered themselves – not the pragmatic “micropolitics” of “molecular” revolutions, not the newly communist “spaces of freedom” Guattari writes about with Antonio Negri (CLU ), which can only be local and fleeting, but a geo-political upheaval at its most planetary and epochal? With theoretical discussion returning to communism in the wake of Badiou, Žižek, and others, therefore, how relevant is Deleuze for rethinking communism? This question is especially pertinent, as many in the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts are closely engaged with debates on the left. It turns out that Deleuze and Guattari definitely provide avenues for thinking and battling in world-historical terms. As we will see at the end of Chapter 2, the micro and the molecular are not necessarily the small. Overcoming the capitalist ecosystem and its fetishism of man conquering nature requires the creation of an entirely “new earth” and “new peoples,” which will have to be based on different principles from those of the system of liberal democracy that most take for granted. Three spatial aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy remain to be discussed: his universalism, his politico-intellectual milieu and encounter with Guattari, and his place within the political topology of Marxism.

Marxists In an interview with Antonio Negri in 1990, Deleuze says: “I think Félix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways perhaps, but both of us” (N 171). It is an interesting comment and no doubt reflects the fact that Negri was becoming one of the key thinkers in European Marxism. Even if it is Guattari who was far more engaged in actual politics, and who reclaims the name communism with Negri in Communists Like Us, Deleuze did feel much affinity with Marx, and was working on a book called The Grandeur of Marx when he died. What allows them both to become

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Marxists, in different ways, is Marx’s analysis of capital as an immanent system defined by its lines of flight and self-overcoming. This emphasis on lines of flight allows Deleuze and Guattari to find the potentiality for politics at the heart of capitalism, even in such a technocratic juggernaut like the European Union. Instead of the proletariat, Deleuze talks to Negri of war-machines, which, as we will see in the next chapter, have “nothing to do with war but to do with a particular way of occupying, taking up spacetime, or inventing new spacetimes: revolutionary movements (people don’t take enough account, for instance, of how the PLO has had to invent a space-time in the Arab world), but artistic movements too, are war-machines in this sense” (N 172). Deleuze’s strong support for the Palestinian cause is worth returning to as well in our next chapter. Here we need to note his definition of revolutionary movements as the occupation and invention of “space-times.” As an intellectual faithful to the irruption of May 1968, Deleuze would have no doubt been enthusiastic about the reinvention of mass politics in the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Syriza, Black Lives Matter, and other “movements,” “masses,” “spaces,” or “times” which illustrate his ontology of the event (Chapter 3), even if he is clear revolutions per definition fail under the weight of reaction and denial (ABC G for gauche, left). It is also clear that Deleuze’s self-professed Marxism does not extend to rethinking communism, and he never felt discussions about communism concerned him. Indeed, his critique of technocapitalism and support for popular and minority uprisings could equally be framed in entirely non-Marxist terms. When Negri asks him, “Is communism still a viable option?” Deleuze answers, “Maybe, I don’t know” (N 174–75). Does this hesitation evince the disappearance of utopia after the waning of 1960s radicalism? Deleuze says he agrees with Negri there is a certain melancholy to A Thousand Plateaus, for all its affirmation. His concept of society of control, the focus of the conversation, is one in which communication technologies and consumption generalize the population’s subjection to biopower more insidiously than state institutions can (N 177–82). Can such a pessimistic framework lead to anything other than a pluralist, aestheticizing, quasi-anarchist politics happening nowhere and everywhere? Pinning down Deleuze’s politics is not so easy. It is worth noting at key moments Deleuze and Guattari both switch to artistic

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creativity when they set out theorizing the who and where of political invention. Asked by Negri how the unbearability of existence, exemplified by the “shame at being human” after Auschwitz, can be once and for all removed by politics, Deleuze prefers not to offer his own theory of collective revolutionary subjectivity on a par with Hardt and Negri’s “constituent power” and “multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2004; see also ABC R for resistance). Instead Deleuze says resistance or becoming-minoritarian happens through the invocation of “a people” irreducible to existing populations, an idea we will discuss in the next chapter. Of interest here is that he adds it is only the best of artists who succeed in creating a people: “Art is resistance: it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame” (N 174). Altogether it does seem that molecular revolutions in art and science, and secondarily in friendship and apprenticeship, are dearer in Deleuze’s oeuvre than the organizational question of what a revolution might be in the name of. If in Deleuze and Guattari the dedication to radical change is everywhere, it seems fair to say this also means they do not give politics its own site, as different from other practices. Nevertheless Deleuze and Guattari share with communism (and against anarchism) a keen interest in positioning their thought within universal history. The concepts of globalization and the Anthropocene quickly bring us to the philosophy of history, so crucial to the reflection upon itself of colonial capitalism since the Renaissance. This chapter has shown critical understandings of global process offer a fuller concept of space if they emphasize the interdependencies and extreme unevenness between places and denounce the provincialisms that perpetuate this unevenness. In examining the multiplicity of material and environmental factors holding social formations together and making them collapse, the old question returns of whether there has been and might still be any direction and end to the adventure of the human species on Earth. This question has become all the more crucial as the scenario of self-annihilation is no longer found only in disaster movies. Guattari’s lifelong political activism shows the concepts he and Deleuze devised can be of immediate use for actually instigating revolutionary spaces and movements. The words “space” and “movement” are never mere metaphors, perhaps especially not in politics. Grounding philosophy immanently in the earth helps rethink the bodies, networks, environments, mappings, institutions, public squares, and battles that are usually gathered under the term

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“politics.” At its best, geophilosophy could interrupt the taken-forgranted contraptions like sovereignty, the rational individual, the market, and the public sphere, and reorganize politics as collective experimentation with the possibilities and constraints that a multilayered, multi-temporal mechanosphere offers. Unlike Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari only appeal to life to build another possible world, a new globalization against the seemingly natural one of capital. However, most readers have not shown the same dedication to revolutionary creativity and critique. There is a geographical and historical bias in this depoliticization of French philosophy. The reception of Deleuze outside France gives little attention to the tumultuous milieu in which his thinking was implicated. He and Guattari participated in the great debates around structuralism, the theoretical legacies of Freud and Marx, the neoliberalization of “socialist” parties and unions, the Cultural Revolution in China, the far-left cells and terrorism, neocolonialism, everyday oppression by the nuclear family and mass media, and the place of the university in reproducing this whole system. These debates were most intense in the international uprisings of 1968 and the establishment of the radical university of Vincennes where Deleuze taught. All this is indispensable for understanding the Deleuze-event in French philosophy. Readers exaggerate his interest in art or the natural sciences at the expense of sensing and developing his political relevance, his place and time. It tends to be forgotten why Anti-Oedipus was written at all: to create new concepts from the encounter between a philosopher who had barely engaged in politics and a far-left psychiatrist whose radical concepts required more philosophical consistency. Many on the Parisian intellectual scene, then dominated by Althusserians and Maoists, regarded Anti-Oedipus as an excessively extravagant and sophomoric attempt to continue the spark of revolution. While Deleuze and Guattari were generally seen as ultra-left in Marxist parlance, as eclectic adventurists, the uptake in Anglophone countries has with some exceptions severed all their ties with revolutionary politics. Now, the concept of earth or Earth has become the central site for global politics. Even mainstream institutions like the UN and World Bank agree that climate change demands a rethinking of inherited concepts like utility, freedom, and justice. But Guattari’s The Three Ecologies explains why the Anthropocene follows directly from the logic of capital. There is already a slow apocalyptic

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scene for tens of millions as they suffer storms, shortages, warfare, displacement, and epidemics. Here Guattari’s sense of urgency and injustice stays true to the diversification of emancipatory struggles associated with May 1968, which could complement Marxism to start thinking of a different mode of production. While the analyses of capital’s ravages in Marxist geography and ecosocialism are broadly compatible with geophilosophy, they tend to remain limited by dichotomies like capital/nature, reason/body, and reform/ revolution. For Guattari and Deleuze, if there is something that is fully human, and fully “natural” (that is, capable of diving through the strata and making new connections), it is capital. Meanwhile ecofeminist, eco-anarchist, and new age imaginations present the earth as pushed out of equilibrium and violated by man, technology, or power, and demand a return to a wholesome relationship between community and deeper strata and rhythms. All such holistic and communitarian reterritorialization risks invoking “the wrong earth” and “the wrong people,” as Deleuze and Guattari said of Heidegger at the beginning of this chapter. Most environmentalism does not see the anthropic stratum is itself machinic, while anarchism doesn’t see assemblages cannot be purified of territoriality and orderings from above. Neither would Deleuze and Guattari have time for the libertarian and mostly white and male fantasies of a cyberspatial noosphere or planet-brain preparing to revolutionize life on the genetic level and colonize other planets. Without a concept of mechanosphere all such new myth-making ultimately reproduces the age-old optimism in which man is separate, already a reasonable and universal individual able to transcend mere earth. Deleuzian materialism can aid in rethinking the universality that has come to the middle of the global political agenda by avoiding this kind of hubristic humanism.

Universalization What is the scope or spatiotemporal scale of politics? Conceptions of politics tend to pertain to the level of the state and the city, and since the 1960s in the West, also the community and the body. Deleuze’s politics is philosophical. For modern thought from Kant and Marx onwards, the truest politics happens at the level of world-history.

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Even if the definition of “world” has until recently been patriarchal and Eurocentric, it is this Enlightenment legacy that Deleuze and Guattari would never concede to postmodern cynicism or the reactionary ideologies of community and nation resurgent across the world. The Anthropocene plainly raises the problem of universality as never before, while pseudo-solutions like adaptation, resilience, carbon markets, and geoengineering belie their provincialist intentions. There can be little doubt that the most rigorous defense of the universalism of the French revolutionary legacy today is found in Badiou. Badiou’s system (2005: 109–12, 214) conceptualizes universality as an ongoing process entirely dependent on actual militants. Universalization becomes the opposite of all traditional universalisms, which were based on natural and legal rights. It occurs only in the wake of a revolutionary event instigating a continuing faithful line of escape from all identities and state institutions, including that of the proletariat and the communist party. There is no prior content to Badiou’s subject of universalization. Consisting of nothing but self-constitutive enunciation and struggle, his collective communist subject is strictly speaking agnostic about empirical processes like climate change and financialization. If Deleuze and Guattari remain Marxists, if they call for new peoples and even a new earth, this chapter ends with the suggestion that their earthliness could provide a material support for Badiou’s formalism. First it must be noted Deleuze and Guattari often take aim at universals, whether of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Freud, or Chomsky even as they accept that capital and the Oedipus complex are universalizing vectors. The philosophical idealism in bourgeois concepts such as the subject and progress are anathema to Deleuze’s effort, especially in Difference and Repetition, to break with dogma and common sense. Difference-in-itself, singularity, and perspective, not the universal or the good, are his Nietzschean commitments. Deleuze’s allergy to traditional essences and human rights universalism, and his preference for geography against history, also eschew anchoring politics in some identitarian tradition as happens in Christianity and submitting it to a moralistic tribunal of reason separate from the concrete problems of life as happens in Kant. Neither does Deleuze’s antihistoricism embrace some mosaic of particularities: multicultural pluralism is a false universalism pretended from a particular (white) positionality. In Deleuze’s

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extended sense philosophical “geography” consists of and through a multiplicity of perspectives and becomings, which only secondarily coalesce into places and formations. Nevertheless Capitalism and Schizophrenia is explicitly universal in scope. It abounds with universalizing terms like plane of immanence, universal minoritization (ATP 106), and absolute deterritorialization. However radical, the two books follow an old liberal convention presenting a theory of three broad moments or stages of societal development (savage or nomadic, imperial or despotic, and civilized or capitalist). Indeed, Anti-Oedipus explicitly states it is an exercise in universal history (AO 21). Unlike in other poststructuralism and revisions of Marxism, Anti-Oedipus posits that “it is correct to retrospectively understand all history in light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly” (AO 140). In hindsight the becoming-global of humanity along the inhumanly aggressive force of capital seems to have been necessary all along even if it was always contingent. As Marx’s Capital (1992) shows, capital is a feedback loop enhancing its own conditions of possibility via the production of surplus, commodity fetishism, and expansion. Capitalism has always and everywhere been humanity’s mad shadow. “If capitalism is the universal truth, it is so in the sense that makes capitalism the negative of all social formations” (AO 153). A real tendency of all exchange, extraction, and exploitation, capitalism is the only conceivable mode of production capable of subsuming the planet’s entire surface and beyond – all space and meaning, as we will see in the next chapter. Still, Marx is perverted in a communism that would see itself as the teleological pinnacle of universal history. Capitalism itself continuously creates and displaces its own barriers through its unique process of deterritorialization: “if we say that capitalism determines the conditions and the possibility of a universal history, this is true only insofar as capitalism has to deal essentially with its own limit, its own destruction” (AO 140). Capitalism thrives on difference and even tolerates variants like Soviet state communism. There is nothing mystical or predetermined about its universality. “In a word, universal history is not only retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical” (AO 140). While Anti-Oedipus concedes capital’s universality to the apologetics of neoliberalism, it has nothing to do with the latter’s

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optimism about the rational individual. Instead, it builds on Nietzsche’s infamous prophecy of a new humanity, an overhumanity (Übermensch), which would break with all values hitherto, including of course those of liberalism and nationalism. With Anti-Oedipus we could even suggests that schizophrenia, which it rethinks as a general affliction universalized under capitalism, could be something like the overpowering prophetic creativity that the awareness of human extinction imposes on some psyches. Schizophrenia is “our very own ‘malady’, modern man’s sickness. The end of history has no other meaning. In it the two meanings of process meet, as the movement of social production that goes to the very extremes of its deterritorialization, and as the movement of metaphysical production that carries desire along with it and reproduces it in a new Earth” (AO 130–31). Recall how depression is a harbinger of cosmic catastrophe in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, except that Anti-Oedipus depersonalizes and universalizes schizophrenia (I will return to this point in the next chapter). The seeming defense of schizophrenia as a terrestrial-scale process might evince a dark Romantic line traversing Deleuze’s philosophy and take some readers to a nihilistic corner to revel in imminent extinction. The perverse mimicry of melancholia about the end of the world is no doubt going to become more prevalent amongst some young male theorists as the Anthropocene becomes more tangible. If it seems troubling that Deleuze both follows some Eurocentric conventions of universal history and flirts with a dark mysticism, we should remember at least five caveats. First, his intention is to put the polemical force of conventional concepts like savage, despotic, and madness to critical and revolutionary uses. Second, modes of production are not in fact consecutive stages but interpenetrating and present in all social formations in different mixtures. Third, even if there has been an overall movement from simple and local to complex and global, these modes of production are not progressive but limits in the mathematical sense that actual societies rub up against. Such limits are only analyzable in hindsight and history is full of irony, tragedy, and farce. Fourth, if Deleuze and Guatari’s concept of production can be aligned with historians like Braudel (1973) in explaining global history through technology, money, animals, labor, ecosystems, and so on, their machinic approach goes further in denying determinism and reductionism.

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Deleuze throughout emphasizes how material forces are only effectual through the virtual, semiotic, and unconscious registers. Finally, against utopian socialism and Soviet ideology, there can be no question for Deleuze of a final communist stage resolving all contradictions in the capitalist present. There are only many immanent struggles reinforcing molecular possibilities beyond and through capital, state, and community (Gemeinschaft) to which a philosopher creatively responds. Philosophy becomes the quintessential site for inventing the start of another world-history, a different mechanosphere, precisely by lodging itself on the immanence of life and its most mobile vector, capital. Using the spatial ambivalence in the etymology of “utopia” (no-place), and in accordance with Frankfurt critical theory, Deleuze and Guattari write: “it is with utopia that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point.” Inversely, politics is only revolutionary when it leaves all identity and place behind. “Revolution is absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people” (WP 101). What to make of this enigmatic call for a new earth and a new people? The concept of the new earth, the world to come, derives from an ancient apocalyptic trope in the Middle Eastern monotheistic religions. It finds its clearest expression in Christian eschatology (for example, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more,” Revelation 21:1). A terrible calamity wipes the earth clean of sin and pestilence while prophets promise redemption from suffering in the present to the faithful. Of course, the question of who will be saved for an afterlife forms the central tension between particularity and universality in Christianity. As reworked in more or less Marxist terms in thinkers like Benjamin, Derrida, Badiou, Žižek, and Agamben, the emphasis in eschatological thinking turns away from any identitarian definition of a people who would be preordained for salvation, towards a more radical reinterpretation of the “to come.” Deleuze hails from a completely different tradition from these thinkers, yet offers a rejoinder to the debates around the end of history and what it means to the religious and political notion of the people (see the next chapter). Broadly following Nietzsche, he disconnects the prophecy of a new earth from all pious belief in a single messiah and in a religious identity or lineage. Deleuze insists on a futurity irreducible

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to the past and to what is known yet is something virtually contained in the capitalist present: “the earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, its smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new earth” (ATP 423). Unlike the messianic turn in critical theory, Deleuze’s notion of the to-come does not consist in interpreting and is therefore severed from all theological particularity. Deleuze’s new earth does not point to another, higher world, however deconstructionist the relationship between the beyond and the here and now, but to the creation and multiplication of “smooth spaces” within the geographies of capitalism. Through this immanence to its own milieu – the assemblages of urbanization, industrialization, and colonization – Deleuze’s philosophy could claim to be more revolutionary and universalizing than post-secular critical theory. By diffusing into the readership it creates, philosophy’s becoming-revolutionary is the same as populations becoming-philosophical, and both are modulated by the earth. There is a “constitutive relationship of philosophy with nonphilosophy. Becoming is always double, and it is this double becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new earth” (WP 109). Despite or rather because of the infosphere encroaching both spatially and psychically, there is little artistic and political experimentation. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist. Europeanization does not constitute a becoming but merely the history of capitalism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples. WP 108 The call of Deleuze and Guattari to “believe in this world” has gained much traction and it will do well to close this chapter on the earth with it. As a critical project, inventing a new plane of immanence geophilosophy is not simply opposed to the transcendences of faith in a telos or of universalism; it creates a new way of constructing philosophy’s relationship to its own ecosystem and thereby what it can do on the ethical and political terrain. It is not that the person who does not believe God exists would gain the upper hand, since he would still belong to the old plane

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as negative movement. But, on the new plane, it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. WP 74–75 In short, geophilosophy does not get rid of belief, but belief becomes immanent and a challenge insofar as it requires dealing with what humans share with the earth. This book comes after Deleuze. The poststructuralist critiques of universality have served their purpose, and they occurred before climate change and mass extinction became widely acknowledged. I think Deleuze and Guattari themselves would concede the Anthropocene cannot but summon a new kind of universalism against that of capital, which has recreated the earth in its own image. When all terrestrial space and beyond is overdetermined by a suicidal logic of commodification and concomitant political inertia and with unbearable conditions growing for most of the world population, it is not that “man” or “nature” needs saving. There is no transcendent principle that can deliver vulnerable populations from evil. But simply calling for further deterritorialization and differentiation is an all too easy cop-out. This is where one must carefully unpack Deleuze’s political relevance. Any truly different image of thought has to be combative enough to be able to probe through and dismantle the thick geographies of capital’s false universalism.

CHAPTER TWO

Flows When one is ready to think plate tectonics evaporating into finanscapes, insurance markets capitalizing on extreme weather, and the expression of phyla in poetry, one may be well on the way to grasping Deleuze and Guattari’s relevance to studying the stratifications of the Anthropocene. For Deleuze and Guattari, movements both physical and human profusely impend on one another before becoming stabilized enough to be named. In the constellations called modernity, movement is multiplied to such an extent that it comes to define what the social fundamentally consists of. But all societies are constituted by flux, and in a way the capitalist life is far more rigid than the life of hunter-gatherers. Their anthropology of flux keeps Deleuze and Guattari from conceiving the planetary mess of flows as either linearly progressive or homogeneously chaotic. Globalization is defined by disparities and shifting tipping points, whose mechanisms are largely obscure to the populations living them. Deleuze and Guattari conceive of places, which the next chapter deals with, as products of intersecting flows of violence, desire, and money. Fluidity comes first ontologically, but not necessarily politically. While there is debate whether Deleuze wants to amplify capitalism’s lines of flight against itself, his and Guattari’s analyses incontrovertibly demonstrate that the capitalist mode of production entails greed, fascism, and madness. The where of these effects is the theme of this chapter.

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Populations Flows constitute populations, which are necessarily more dense in some places than others. The Capitalism and Schizophrenia project reconceptualizes not just flow and desire but the social structures that they constitute, at scales from the pack and the crowd to civilizations and “races.” This insistence on populations allows Deleuze and Guattari to join a postwar trend towards conceiving world-history against the essentialist geography of conservatives who write about bounded civilizations and their alleged clashing. There are probably no thinkers who have put more emphasis on population flow for understanding history and social multiplicity. But we have seen that geophilosophy can tap into scales far below and above that of the human. The Anthropocene creates ever more anxiety-prone configurations of flows, not just of refugees, terrorists, and celebrities, but weapons, data, viruses, rare earths, and endangered species. Deleuze’s lesser known concept of islands shows geology partakes in any social formation and even the remotest solitude interacts with the state and with capital. The method for privileging flow ontologically is called nomadology. But, first, the ontology of populations requires a mathematical understanding of multiplicity.

Multiplicities In order to understand flows one must understand the fluidity in what flows. For Deleuze, any thing is a multiplicity that is already intensive, self-differentiating, moving in place. He is deeply involved with the age-old philosophical problem of the one and the many. Arguably, the constitutive tension between the Badiousian and Deleuzian takes on multiplicity and event forms the core of what materialist ontology and politics consist of today. In his last years Deleuze proposed to Badiou to coauthor a short book, Sets and Multiplicities, based on their letters. Inexplicably, Deleuze retracted just before he died (see Badiou 1999: preface). Badiou conceives multiplicity, as much of analytical metaphysics and science do, in light of set theory in mathematics. Set theory aims to provide mathematics with an absolute foundation based on only six axioms and their ramifications. On the one hand, as is revealed when Venn

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diagrams come to pedagogical aid, one could say that set theory is itself the purest theory of spatiality. Concepts like membership, extensionality, emptiness, separation, union, and so on obviously trigger the spatial imagination. On the other hand, perhaps set theory’s abstraction consists precisely in formulating the “logical” decisions that thought has already made before it even begins imagining anything spatial or quantitative. Set theory is able to systematically reduce all thinking and knowing to the formal figure of multiplicity. This provides Badiou (2005) a platform to make the startling claim, rewriting many centuries of philosophy, that ontology as the science of being (Aristotle) is nothing but mathematics (that is, contemporary set theory). Amongst the revolutionary implications is that reality consists of multiplicities all the way up and down and the intrinsic void is the site of change. Most important to Badiou’s critique of Deleuze is Georg Cantor’s demonstration that there is an order of infinities but there can be no infinity of infinities, that is, no One-All of and to the universe. Kant (1999: 460–75) had already argued the nonexistence of the all in his antinomies but still held on to the one of the transcendental subject. For Badiou the unity of the subject, society, God, and world as conceived by various traditions can be shown to be an effect of “counting”. Though Deleuze agrees with this insistence on multiplicity, according to Badiou (1999) he flirts with a kind of pantheism because he underestimated the philosophical importance of set theory for the modern conception of multiplicity. For Badiou, instead, a more meticulous excision of oneness must build up some kind of formal system. He claims to be able to guarantee a fully immanent atheist and revolutionary constructibility of social reality, centered around the unprecedented event that arrives from outside the purview of philosophy. While Deleuze never singles out politics as a creative practice, politics is one of Badiou’s “truth procedures,” the other three being science, love, and art. The philosophical disagreement is therefore also a fundamental disagreement about what humans should do to make their lives better. Together with The Grandeur of Marx, which Deleuze had planned to write, Sets and Multiplicities is the most tantalizing possibility of a book sketching twenty-first century materialist philosophy. Both books would have greatly helped a Deleuzian theorization of the politics of space. In any case we can suppose

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Deleuze would have happily pleaded guilty to the charge that he is pre-Cantorian. The multiplicity of pure mathematics is for him the wrong kind of abstraction, and set theory is the ultimate “axiomatic” approach. Whether deliberately or unwittingly, axioms are commandments of “major” or “royal” science, beginning with Euclid. According to A Thousand Plateaus, as we will shortly see, axioms provide an epistemology conducive to the territorializing projects of the state and accumulation. Sets are discrete wholes in which membership is entirely clear and homogenous. Even if we allow for continuous gradations in belonging like in fuzzy sets, how to formalize intensity, probability, or continuum is of no primary concern, unlike in calculus and topology. Deleuze is in no way averse to mathematics. What he and Guattari criticize in formalization is the fact that it legitimates itself by repressing the incongruities, paradoxes, and conundrums that had prompted it in the first place. In particular, in axiomatizing the fundamental problems of number and infinity to make knowledge flow easier, Deleuze implicitly takes Cantor to task for being a friend not only of theology but of capitalism. Being itself always upsets the possibility of belonging and counting. Set theory fundamentally misses the point (or rather, the flow) of what it means to be a multiplicity. For Deleuze, in order to grasp multiplicity ontologically, it is rather differential or infinitesimal calculus – which aims to determine covariation of quantities towards immanent limits, developed by Newton and Leibniz in the seventeenth century – that remains superior to set theory. As we relate in Chapter 4, calculus gets at what Difference and Repetition calls the internal difference of things, whereas set theory only sees inclusion and external relations. In addition to Leibniz, Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity harks back to the geometry of Bernhard Riemann, some decades before Cantor (DR 162). Riemann built on algebra to liberate geometry from metric and actual space, that is, the age-old axiomatics of Euclid. A space with any number of dimensions was now conceivable, and Riemann called such a space a multiplicity or, after Kant, manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit). “It was a decisive event when the mathematician Riemann uprooted the multiple from its predicate state and made it a noun, ‘multiplicity’ ” (ATP 504–5). Whereas the traditional Euclidian multiple is simply a countable heap of the same things, “Riemannian space is pure patchwork. It has connections, or

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tactile relations. It has rhythmic values not found elsewhere, even though they can be translated into a metric space. Heterogeneous, in continuous variation, it is a smooth space, insofar as smooth space is amorphous and not homogeneous” (ATP 485). Deleuze’s multiplicity is not merely a heuristic of mathematicians but exists in the real world just beneath the entities we usually perceive: becoming and multiplicity are the same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors. ATP 249 With Riemann, topics of space (and topos itself means “place”) like proximity, curvature, surface, divergence, volume, enfolding, knots, and so on can be rigorously studied by concentrating on what can be regionally determined by space’s variables (dimensions) independent from any prior Euclidian or Newtonian axes: “multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organization belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system” (DR 182). Riemannian manifolds became essential to mathematics, and then to physics. In combination with statistics they enabled Einstein’s relativity theory and quantum mechanics. After Deleuze it is possible to argue well-constructed mathematical ideas directly incorporate real spacetime because they participate in the same abstract machine that drives the things they represent. We must note that there is some liberty on Deleuze’s interpretation of Riemann. In topology a manifold is an algebraic space in which variations and relationships take place, whereas for Deleuze a manifold consists of those variations and relationships themselves. For Deleuze, actual space, the three dimensions we perceive and know, is subtended, construed, and exceeded by a virtual realm of interpenetrating multiplicities in all numbers of dimensions, whereas

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for most mathematicians multiplicities are discursive constructions. Difference and Repetition redefines Plato’s “Ideas” as multiplicities, thereby replacing the anthropocentrism of dialectical and phenomenological conceptions of determination with an ancient realism. The Idea as multiplicity is nonlocalizable and “intrinsically defined, without external reference or recourse to a uniform space in which it would be submerged” (DR 183), somewhat like a “structure” in Lévi-Strauss, or an essence in Aristotle, except that it is contingent, generative, and permeable, precisely because it continuously responds to the problems of actual space. At bottom set theory’s pure synchronicity cannot describe real movement and change, and is not meant to. This atemporality is something Deleuze cannot accept. Following Leibniz and Bergson, he thinks it is quite uninteresting to isolate a number of elements in abstraction without considering the gradients, disequilibria, foldings, interactions, or speeds that they contain or that could affect them. Any togetherness for Deleuze is essentially differential because its elements cannot but hold each other in tension by virtue of their differences, and thereby already constitute the potentiality for interaction with their milieu. This “problematic” or internal difference of multiplicity, this originary perforation of space by time, is absolutely crucial to Deleuze’s ontology, but it seems to be bracketed at that highest level of abstraction that Cantor discovered. However, given their interest in abstraction, Deleuze and Guattari may not have sufficiently appreciated how the Cantor-event irrevocably changed the modern philosophical canvas. Badiou (2005) is correct that there is a before and after Cantor. Traditional philosophical concepts like multiplicity, infinity, nothingness, and the one cannot but be rethought after set theory. Perhaps A Thousand Plateaus too easily conflates axiomatics with the status quo and should have considered the minor uses of mathematical logic. Just like topology is for Deleuze a minoritarian twist on the imperial tradition of geometry, there are more revolutionary currents in set theory, algebra, and logic; not in the least Badiou’s project. Exploring mathematical abstraction, for instance the concept of space, only at the level of calculus or topology prevents pushing thought beyond its present limitations. To summarize, a Deleuzian multiplicity is not a set but an emergent, mobile, fuzzy moving-together of many elements. It is split between an actual or spatiotemporal side and a “virtual” or

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“ideal” (in the Platonic sense) side. The easiest and most important example of multiplicity is a human population. In particular, we should note it has since the last World War been customary to debunk the essentialism of the old concept of “races” as in itself racist and false by pointing to the massively obvious fact that humans have always migrated and intermixed. Recent genetics shows even the different species of the genus Homo cannot be thought outside a rhizomatic interpenetrating of genetic lines. Instead of the old colonialist and anthropocentric imagination of discrete “races” or “cultures” originating in and inhabiting discrete regions, today’s biological concept of population increasingly stresses continuous variation and drift. The capitalist mode of production pushes the nature of multiplicity the furthest away from essence, towards differentiation and mobility. Indeed, in a rare invocation of social theory, Difference and Repetition mentions modern human populations or “social multiplicities” as a key example for Deleuze’s theory of virtual Ideas: a system of multiple ideal connections or differential relations between differential elements: these include relations of production and property relations which are established not between concrete individuals but between atomic bearers of labour-power or representatives of property. The economic instance is constituted by such a social multiplicity – in other words, by the varieties of these differential relations. DR 186 Perhaps class and uneven development are by virtue of their differentiality (rather than relationality) the best examples of Deleuze’s theory of multiplicity. What matters in human populations under capitalism is not their individuality but solely their variable infra-human capacity to “go with the flow” of the system, that is, as Marx demonstrates, capital itself. Deleuze therefore agrees with Althusser that the structural economic determination by capital is basic to any critical theorization of the social in modernity (DR 86). Difference and Repetition reminds the reader that Marx’s innovation was precisely to reconceive the division of labor amongst humans as productive of history itself, the “differenciation at the heart of a social multiplicity” (DR 207). The population dynamics of our species – growth, decline, epidemics, refugees, feminism, gay

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marriage, ageing, segregation, genocide, famine – are fundamentally determined by the flows of money. Thus to conceptualize human settlement and gene flow without noting their “determination in the last instance” (Althusser) by capital would be to miss the full conceptual strength of Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity. This analysis of the capital-population nexus is unavailable in the settheoretical framework of Badiou.

Nomads Deleuze and Guattari conceive two types of societal multiplicity, the nomadic and the sedentary, corresponding to the two kinds of space we will discuss in the next chapter, smooth and striated space. In these pairs they clearly privilege the first. Their method for thinking populations is called nomadology, a pun on and radicalization of its metaphysical precursor, the monadology of Leibniz (1898). In a nutshell, whereas for Leibniz multiplicities were ultimately anchored in the omniscience of God, in Deleuze’s immanent framework they are declared free to roam. Difference and Repetition distinguishes two ways through which philosophy can think how differences are “distributed” logically. The traditional and commonsense understandings of difference, going back to Aristotle, Deleuze calls sedentary. Differences are ordered on a hierarchical scale (genus-species-individual, basenoble, etc.; more on scale in this chapter’s conclusion), by analogy and proportion (a is like b, only smaller), as discrete identities (they can be counted), and through binary relations of opposition (black and white, 0 and 1). The faciality and capture plateaus in A Thousand Plateaus show this is an ideological conception of difference and corresponds to what real civilization has done to physical space and human populations. Sedentary logic was therefore a material reality many centuries before Aristotle formulated it, through agriculture, religion, law, ownership, and quantification. One could say the judgment of God or gods saturates the land. The agrarian question may well have been very important for this organisation of judgment as the faculty which distinguishes parts (“on the one hand and on the other hand”). Even among the gods, each has his domain, his category, his attributes, and all

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distribute limits and lots to morals in accordance with destiny. Then there is a completely other distribution which must be called nomadic, a nomad nomos, without property, enclosure or measure. Here, there is no longer a division of that which is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves in an open space – a space which is unlimited, or at least without precise limits. DR 36 The nomadic distribution of difference follows from Deleuze’s metaphysics of univocity and an ethics of “crowned anarchy” (DR 224), which breaks with religion, the state, and the commodityform. Differences are affirmed not because they are worthy in the same manner (apples and oranges are both fruit, or created by God, or sold at the supermarket), but because they are singularly capable of differentiation (apples differ from oranges, which differ from mushrooms; moreover each apple is different). Any spatial or organizational limits to the differentiation inhere in the singularity of the elements themselves. Deleuze therefore understands the nomadic as what distributes itself, and the sedentary as what is distributed by, for, and from some central authority. If the real space associated with nomadic logic is open and fuzzy, that of the sedentary tends to be segregated, enclosed, and quantified. On a more empirical and political plane, nomadology could be seen in light of the general French valorization of “savage thinking” after Lévi-Strauss. But Deleuze is also taken by the infatuations with nomads and deserts of the (rather conservative) likes of T.E. Lawrence and Arnold Toynbee. Pushing political anthropology and historiography beyond their empiricist limitations, Deleuze and Guattari make the nomad their central figure to critique the white European standards to which all histories, legal systems, and artistic productions are held accountable (a process they link to “faciality”; see Chapter  3). The hegemonic schemas of the social sciences as well as of economic policy from Stalin to the World Bank place savages at the bottom of a normative ladder of increasing complexity and scale. Nomadism is supposedly followed by agriculture, pastoralism, despotism, nation-state, and finally the technocapitalist “global village.” Even if it depends on great flows, a civilization is per definition sedentary and intolerant of vagabondage. Its land and population are striated, as Chapter 3 will call it, that is, ordered

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legally and geometrically and policed as such. Its religion and philosophy will be striated too. This explains why Deleuze had a soft spot for the celebration of travel in US fiction, of being “on the road,” never in place and always in between. Authors like Jack Kerouac “create a new Earth; but perhaps the movement of the earth is deterritorialization itself. American literature operates according to geographical lines: the lines towards the West, the discovery that the true East is in the West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back, to go beyond” (D 37). The minoritarian travel and “tripping” that beatniks, hippies, and ravers engage in can be helpful for understanding the ways capitalism allows for creating new multiplicities subtracted from its sedentary logic. However, travel swiftly becomes tourism. “Independent” traveling in modernity has to be distinguished from nomadism proper because it is largely predicated on capitalism and urbanization. Kerouac (1957) needed a car, a record player, and barbiturates. Truly Deleuzian nomadism would instead create its own resources, its own art, and its own space. A landscape becomes smooth when its whole corresponding population travels continuously. Nomadism is no rite of passage, definitely not a holiday. In fact, it isn’t travel at all but a way of life, a matter of life and death. There are not only strange voyages in the city but voyages in place: we are not thinking of drug users, whose experience is too ambiguous, but of true nomads. We can say of the nomads, following Toynbee’s suggestion: they do not move. They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating, or holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave, that they leave only in order to conquer and die. ATP 482 True nomads have the capacity to keep populating and defending their own smooth space without becoming ensnared in striation, which is seldom the case for backpackers or bikers. True nomads exhibit the endurance and independence of a war-machine, which enters striated space only to attack it. The aim of nomads is never to provide labor, like migrants do. The smooth space nomads create can be conceptual too. Hence Deleuze’s main example of a revolutionary nomadic war-machine in philosophy is Nietzsche, or rather Nietzsche’s writings (DI 260).

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One should ask why Deleuze and Guattari reproduce the classic orientalist cliché of the desert nomad. The short answer is that philosophy is not literary theory or anthropology. Deleuze often uses available stereotypes deliberately and liberally to delineate, in a precise yet visceral way, a novel conceptual sensibility otherwise difficult to name. For grasping the nexus between population, landscape, mobility, and resources the figure of the nomad is a helpful heuristic. Deleuze is not talking about actual nomads at all but the nomad-Idea, the geohistorically contingent tendencies that exist in all human populations. The Tuareg or Inuit embody these virtual tendencies quite strongly. Deleuze could also have written about aboriginal Australians – which would have been a better inspiration, though no less stereotyped today – or the Roma, or punk squatters. By deliberately passing through concrete stereotypes perhaps we gain more rigorous and surprising abstractions from state geopower. The advantages of nomadology for thinking population are threefold. First, nomadic flow is primary. It comes before cities and states both historically and conceptually. The idea of movement has become important to geography and anthropology but is still resisted by a reactionary public increasingly obsessed with identity (hence nationalist xenophobia). For Deleuze and Guattari instead, settlements and borders only exist as a result of the confluence and contestations of a hotchpotch of genes and languages coming from far away (think of the confluences that made Hungary and Finland, Baghdad and Sydney). Second, nomadism is as fragile as it is combative. The state already exists as latency in nomadism as a sociological option (just like capitalism does) and has to be deliberately warded off if the nomadic way of life has to be preserved. Third, nomads construct their own kind of space, which is not “striated” as it is in civilization – terraced, gridded, skylined, and centralized (all roads lead to Rome) – but “smooth.” And, finally, Deleuze and Guattari are very keen to think through how difficult it is to maintain smooth space. Stratification and territorialization always lurk around the corner. The landscapes of nomads are all those unsuitable for agriculture: tropical rainforests, the steppe, the Arctic, swamps, archipelagos, highlands, but especially the desert, which is Deleuze’s favorite landscape. It would be wrong to think of these landscapes as homogeneous. Rather, they are plateaus in the Batesonian sense

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(Bateson 1972), spaces replete with intensity and danger, which, if traversed skillfully, yield a continuous and constant existence. Those who traverse smooth space do not simply survive but continuously become slightly different through repetitions, which don’t add up to a linear sequence: “nomads have no history; they only have a geography” (ATP 393). Moreover, nomads successfully resist the onslaught of striation. Deleuze is not interested in the strong patriarchal traditions that empirical nomads usually observe, but in this Stoic adherence to a harsh landscape by continuously enfolding it. For a nomad, resources (prey, oasis, mine, marketplace) are difficult to find and yet there is never a place to settle. The nomadic approach to space is fundamentally different from that of civilization: To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the inbetween has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. ATP 380 Though Difference and Repetition likens nomadic distribution to madness, nomadic mobility is emphatically not chaotic. While never as stable as in civilization, there are paths and routes that nomads trace, and that do create provisional places in the phenomenological sense (Tuan 1977). But paths and places are relays. Their function is to keep the social multiplicity moving. What physics calls path dependency – the constancy of a virtual diagram of behaviors – is necessary for the existence of all social formations. But while path dependency is rigidly and permanently inscribed into the striated landscape of civilization as roads and monumental buildings (see the landscape remnants today of the Roman Empire), it remains flexible and largely intangible in the desert and is altered without any reflection or plan. Every point in smooth space is defined not by its unique coordinates (x, y) but by its utter likeness to all other points with which it can be substituted if necessary.

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Unlike migrants, nomads never arrive. Their journey is always in the middle (au milieu). Nomadism is the site where humans come closest to directly inhabiting the earth insofar as it is the great realm of self-ungrounding, as we saw in Chapter 1. Instead of becoming rooted and celebrated in Romantic nationalism or localism, the nomad is continuously en route. If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary (the sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a territory. ATP 381 While externally nomads require and create smooth space, as population they are organized as packs. The bands of warriors and “primitive hordes” central to Freud’s speculative prehistory are revalorized in A Thousand Plateaus as the best concept for grasping not just the mobility and obscurity of nomadic multiplicities, but their loose organization itself as necessitated by the challenges of smooth space. Here Deleuze and Guattari launch an original attack on psychoanalysis for continuing the human exceptionalism of the Enlightenment (though they omit Freud’s discussion of masculinity). When it comes to roaming, migrations, and territoriality, there is no difference in kind between human and nonhuman populations. Their favorite example of a group of animals is the wolf pack. The second plateau, “1914: One or Several Wolves” criticizes Freud’s blindness, in a case on the eve of World War I, regarding the obvious fact that in dreams wolves always come in multiples (in movies too). “On the verge of discovering a rhizome, Freud returns to mere roots” (ATP 27). A wolf does not necessarily stand for a unitary parent in a family tree but is more simply a member of a pack. That’s what’s scary about wolves. The upshot of the critique of Freud’s anthropocentrism and familialism is a new theory of crowds and group subjects continuing Guattari’s psychiatric work on groups (see MR ). Politically, it seems

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the horizontal fluidity of the wolf pack is more attractive as starting point for thinking crowd multiplicity than the Nazi parade. A pack (horde, rabble) is without center or leader, fraternal. Because a pack roams, members go in and out of it all the time, unlike the definitive membership of a mathematical set. This relaying is what constitutes the swiftness and strength of such a multiplicity in the first place. Computer simulations of swarm and mob behavior show that the cohesion of a moving multiplicity is a matter of very simple physics. The differentiality between members of this kind of multiplicity can be reduced to their spatial position vis à vis their peers. “In becoming-wolf, the important thing is the position of the mass, and above all the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or wolf-multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack, how far it stays, how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity” (ATP 29). However, a closer look at wolf or nomad or warrior behavior shows that there is more going on. “Among the characteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection of particles” (33). A pack requires constant modification and an opportunistic approach to rules. Such inventiveness requires a deep attunement to the environment. Even if sheep, locusts, and sardines also exhibit quite fascinating multiplicitous locomotion, it is clear why Deleuze and Guattari are so fond of wolves. Wolves attack. They have tactics. The political expression of the nomad is what Deleuze and Guattari call the war-machine. Nomadology is from the beginning a philosophical valorization of a kind of guerrilla combat resisting the further diffusion of ownership and the state, we’ll see later in this chapter, even if Deleuze’s concept of revolution is philosophical and not strategic. The concept of pack “scales up” to the concepts of the people and race. Together with Freud, Deleuze and Guattari recall what is no doubt the most classical and vexed example of a nomadic warmachine, the one Moses led out of Egypt. (We will forget for a moment this pack contains also one of the most classical and vexed examples of leadership and of race, and focus on the time before Sinai when Moses was not yet absolute ruler.) If exile has constituted

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the Jewish people or ethnos like no other it is only insofar as they themselves chose a destiny of deterritorialization. In inventing a stern and jealous God who tortures populations, the ancient Hebrews also made monotheism immediately a question of justice for entire populations. The nomadic trajectory out of the Pharaoh’s despotic state is an absolutely new kind of relationship between humans and the divine (ATP 122ff), and had to take place across a sea and a desert. Emphasizing equality before the law, the new Mosaic pack wards off any internal inequalities based on tribal lineages and bureaucracy (ATP 393). This newfound cohesion depends on a singular hostility towards all other tribes. Moses discovers that exodus and covenant call for a war-machine, what Deleuze and Guattari call here a “machine of the Just,” demanding all Jewish boys combat the various state apparatuses which this people are led by God to conquer (ATP 417). The genocidal fantasies of the ancient Israelites shows to what extent a protoracist and totalitarian state is incipient in any pack. And as Deleuze is well aware, it is one of the most tragic ironies of the history of populations that in the modern reactualization of the Hebrew people, the nomadic and universalist aspects of Jewishness are so suppressed by US –Israeli biopolitics. What the example of the Jewish people shows is a central lesson of A Thousand Plateaus: nomadology is to rid political anthropology of all evolutionism. Conceptual pairs like nomadism–civilization are only interesting because they are porous, generative, and asymmetrical. For example, deserts and other smooth spaces continue to exist within sedentary states, which themselves under capital always attempt to conquer and absorb more deserts, oceans, and crevices (Dubai, Las Vegas, Singapore). Hence “it is possible to live striated on the deserts, steppes, or seas; it is possible to live smooth even in the cities, to be an urban nomad” (ATP 482). In fact striation or stratification exist thanks to itinerancy. “Assemblages – in their content – are populated by becomings and intensities, by intensive circulations, by various multiplicities (packs, masses, species, races, populations, tribes . . .)” (D 79). The mad rush for minerals under capitalism means ever more swaths of the planet are plugged directly into the reterritorializations of the law, multinationals, and geopoliticking, all operating along implicitly racial lines. But these striations also require and produce new packs, like the itinerant populations associated with fracking and shipping. The so-called food deserts in U.S. cities are a shameful part of the

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same distribution system that produces suburban monotony, warehouse district gentrification, and chronic homelessness. The oligarchic 0.01 percent can control global capitalism thanks in part to its invisible aeromobility and money management. Understanding social formations as assemblages means analyzing how the aggregations and flows of bodies mutually constitute each other at all scales. As “civilization” causes ever more environmental disasters and wars, which trigger ever new population flows, it also polices and securitizes its borders with ever more racism and greed. Fortress Europe and the political implications of xenophobia in the West form one of the most intense examples of the clash of the sedentary and the nomadic. As many have pointed out, refugees, precisely by not belonging to any body politic, lie at the heart of the modern world-order. Native Americans, India’s partition, the Rwandan genocide, Sudan, Syria’s civil war: each time the complicity of hegemonic powers in producing such massive homelessness says everything about the alleged humanity of humanist civilization. And nomadology could itself be criticized for downplaying the destitution of displacement. Indeed, A Thousand Plateaus says nothing about involuntary migration. Furthermore, in his celebration of U.S. literature and cinema, Deleuze seems to forget like most Europeans that two of the most extreme population management tools, genocide and slavery, were necessary conditions of possibility for the smoothness of the American highway. Still, nomadology is never a straightforward glorification of travel, but an ontology of population flows, and the only one. The tragedies and hypocrisies behind refugees, homelessness, and tourism can be better understood with Deleuze and Guattari even if they could have written more on these topics. The ethical challenge for all living in sedentary society extends much further than being welcoming towards “the asylum seeker” and “the stranger in our midst.” Nomadic ethics is not interpersonal but something more aggressive, already a politics. We will see how Deleuze–Guattari’s nomadic war-machine explores tactics for blocking the expansion of striation and for sustaining revolutionary smooth spaces wherever they happen. Incidentally, if pack and flow are essential to his concept of the social, it is a well-known irony that Deleuze himself hated traveling, especially to conferences. When discussing this paradox in the Abécédaire (ABC V for voyage) he notes most traveling and chatting

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doesn’t encounter anything new. He finds the modern urge to travel rather neurotic and notes how people boast of their adventures: “I’ve done Vietnam, I’ve done Afghanistan. . .” A real rupture with habitual experience requires understanding how “intensities are distributed in other spatialities than that of exterior space.” Reading a book or listening to music can be a better kind of voyaging than tourism because it allows one to become-nomad on the philosophical plane. This commitment to philosophical practice probably also kept Deleuze from embarking on any drug-induced voyaging. From his part, reflecting on his own desire for encountering new places and people (notably New York, Tokyo, São Paulo, Rome), Guattari says that, in comparison, Deleuze “is planted, tied like a goat to the university” (MRB 442). By becoming-goat, Deleuze could invent a new speed of thought through writing, a new kind of voyaging in place. What makes a philosophical life interesting is the concepts that were constructed, not anybiographical details.

Islands The conceptual importance of islands is inversely proportional to their size and proximity. It was by reflecting on the famous variations of the finches on the hard-to-reach Galápagos that it occurred to Darwin (2009: 398–400) to link geographical distribution to heredity in deep time. Absolutely unintentional incremental changes accrue over eons, and contingently converge into speciation events. If the truism of social science is that no man is an island, our next step in Deleuzian geography occurs via social science’s antithesis, the desert island, which Deleuze, in an early essay on this strange topic, calls “the prototype of the collective soul” (DI 13). What he means is that their geological and biogeographical singularity make islands a starting point qua challenge to human flow and population growth. “Islands are either from before or after humankind” (DI 9). The concept of the island helps ascertain what gene flow, biopower, colonialism, and territory are in both their spatial functioning and the ideological unconscious. Deleuze formulates the island concept by drawing from Daniel Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe of 1719, which launched a central philosophical figure – “conceptual persona” in the terms of What is Philosophy? – of European colonial modernity. Crusoe embodies the

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early-capitalist belief in the power of civilization to recommence itself from scratch anywhere by virtue of its orderliness and, in this case, the sheer determination of one virtuous man and his slave, Friday. The celebration of industriousness is also a racialization or facialization (see next chapter) of the bodily affections of the protagonists. Crusoe and Friday form a microcosmic analogy of the real assemblage of plantation labor, which was in the eighteenth century accumulating towards British industrialization. Now, for Marxists (like Amin 1976 or Smith 2008), as much as for Deleuze and Guattari, to think human multiplicity (social formation) is to think inequality and mobility as themselves generative. We now add that the degree zero of European colonial society is found in the shipwreck narrative, and updated in disaster and adventure movies wherein the apocalypse challenges a white man to rebuild the civilization that spawned him. The white man believes it is his responsibility to conquer the furthest bits of earth and transcend all obstacles to his industriousness. The tragedy of ever-encroaching colonization includes the complicity of “savage” populations whom we now wish could have resisted the white man’s greedy appropriation, deadly guns and diseases, and quasi-divine self-confidence. Robinson’s vision of the world resides exclusively in property; never have we seen an owner more ready to preach. The mythical recreation of the world from the deserted island gives way to the reconstitution of bourgeois life from the reserve of capital. [. . .] Robinson’s companion is not Eve, but Friday, docile towards work, happy to be a slave, and too easily disgusted by cannibalism. Any healthy reader would dream of seeing him eat Robinson. DI 12 The myth of subduing a wild island and savages represents a central racist myth driving the expansionism of capitalism. Deleuze takes issue not just with the racism but the metaphysical duality supporting it. According to the myth, Crusoe creates his little civilization by imposing a spatiotemporal regime upon himself, Friday, and “nature.” This legal regime is presented as something external to the bodies and ecosystems it organizes. It is what the dominant European political tradition calls a social contract, the rules whereby society maintains itself. Rational agents are to engage each other according to this contract if they are to

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live together peacefully. Society emerges only when competing individuals transfer some of their natural freedom to the collective level. In his lectures on Rousseau of 1959–60, Deleuze argues against this classical liberal conception (R 19ff). The Hobbesian presupposition is that a “war of all against all” is inevitable without a strong law. This is a convenient justification of European conquest and government. Crusoe’s situation is not at all the state of “nature” as Crusoe already enjoys a theological privilege prior to his shipwreck. Why is he in the Pacific in the first place? Humans never “revert” to “nature” when stranded on an island, as happens in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954). While Hobbes places in nature a determinism of competition that says much about early colonialist England (and nothing, incidentally, about the life of animals and plants), Deleuze reads in Rousseau’s version of the social contract a very different idea of nature, a “genetic virtuality” in which it makes no sense to talk about either atomistic individuals or human instincts (R 10). There is in Rousseau even a proto-Marxist understanding of the irreducibility of the social (R 11). Such a perspective allows one to see that violence or oppression does not constitute a primordial fact, but supposes a civil state, social situations, and economic determinations. If Robinson enslaves Friday, it is not due to Robinson’s natural disposition, and it is not by the power of his fist; he does it with a small capital and the means of production which he saved from the debts, and he does it to subjugate Friday to social tasks, the ideas of which Robinson has not lost in his shipwreck. DI 53 It is only because of the recent inventions of capitalism and racism that Robinson Crusoe can institute the law on “his” island, not because there is some “natural” antagonism between different bodies, much less an innate superiority. If it is not beholden to some grim nature, a population might as well build an entirely new egalitarian society if they really want to, as they do in Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962). Following Rousseau’s notorious concept of the general will, Deleuze notes that a people creates itself to the extent that it exerts a rational, virtuous, fully egalitarian volition relatively autonomous from its physical-geographical limitations (R 24).

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Islands provide a platform for thinking politics and ethics. Throughout his life Deleuze was intrigued by a profound idea of his novelist friend Michel Tournier: perhaps what Sartre and Lacan call the Other (l’Autrui) is not psychological but metaphysical. Perhaps it should be understood as “the expression of a possible world” (LS 308). This idea propels Deleuze’s very first known essay, “Description of Woman,” and the chapter before the conclusion in Difference and Repetition ends with it (DR 260). Tournier develops this line of thought in probably the most directly “Deleuzian” novel, Friday (1967), which upends the Crusoe myth by making Otherness ooze outside the self/other binary, language, and even the human itself. A desert island is a “world without others” – the title of Deleuze’s essay on the novel appended to The Logic of Sense – yet full of what he calls the Other. Where Defoe’s Crusoe is thrifty and anal, Tournier’s cannot stop obsessively producing a surplus of goods and order. He is a sexual being, spending his free time copulating with mud and plants and the island itself, which he calls Esperanza (Hope). Later Crusoe becomes jealous when Friday threatens to take his place in the kingdom he created. The becomings-island of Crusoe and Friday in Tournier’s perverse eroticism allows a departure from the anthropocentrism of standard phenomenological accounts of lonely places. Deleuze points out “the paradox of the desert isle: the one who is shipwrecked, if he is alone, if he has lost the Other-structure, disturbs nothing of the desert isle; rather he consecrates it” (LS 311). Liberated from human others, Friday makes the elements, rocks, and plants sweep into an inhuman erection towards the sun and sky. “It is as if the entire earth were trying to escape by way of the island” (LS 312). Instead of a claustrophobic place of solitude and despair, the fantasy lives of Crusoe and Friday open onto “innocent” or unencumbered Rousseauian nature. Tournier (1967) rewrites Defoe’s narrative to great comic effect. Friday makes Crusoe an apprentice in the ways of the island, which only he knows. But he starts behaving rebelliously at unexpected moments, sabotaging and finally detonating the whole Protestantcapitalist edifice Crusoe had so painstakingly put together. Instead of slotting in neatly as slave and companion, instead of being another, or indeed othered, Friday brims with an earthly virtuality more basic and truer than human sociality and sexual difference. He cheerily subverts the self/other schema and brings to life a totally

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different kind of Other, as “that which organizes Elements into Earth, and earth into bodies, bodies into objects” (LS 318). Friday brings the island to a nonhuman splendor, which quickly starts gnawing at the capitalist striations Crusoe had established. Tournier’s affirmative exoticism makes Friday the real hero of the desert island myth while pushing the myth of the noble savage beyond its limit, into a joyful force that sedentary anthropology cannot contain. Tournier’s novel complements the Deleuze–Guattarian geography of population flows. Social multiplicities and molar (aggregate) differences like class, race, and gender cannot exist outside the particular biophysical and socioeconomic milieus that organize what is possible and desirable for bodies. But this is not environmental determinism. Physical geographies are apprehended only in and through desire and practice. Deleuze briefly argues that it was Rousseau’s innovation to insist that the human species is the only one to actively and collectively seek out climatic and biogeographical conditions (R 25). Humans respond to their environments by way of language, cooperation, and rivalry. Their divisions of labor are shaped by how the prior distributions of such things as iron and nutrients are exploited. Race, inequality, and migration patterns are then specific to contingent geohistories, which themselves are made possible by evolving striations of the earth. For materialists like Spinoza, Marx, and Deleuze, humans remain embedded in nature. The “state of nature” is therefore a profoundly ideological concept. The political problem of flow is not what the “best” kind of state is for a social multiplicity but how people could undercut law and state altogether, to follow the lines of flight lying dormant in their bit of the earth and thereby reinvent themselves as “people.” While Spinoza and Marx would remain central, Deleuze barely refers to Rousseau over the rest of his career. Still, Rousseau’s notion of the general will have an unexpected echo in Deleuze.

People-to-come Every territory has a population, yet many people don’t have a territory. If deterritorialization comes first, what happens to the classic notion of the people? It becomes a vector instead of a given entity. In a few places in A Thousand Plateaus, the cinema books, and What is Philosophy? Deleuze mentions a “people-to-come,”

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injecting a futurity and placelessness that the traditional notion does not have. With this concept, which is closely aligned with the concept of the minoritarian, Deleuze means to supplement the liberaldemocratic tradition in political philosophy in which the only legitimate state power is one constituted by what its entire population wants, as if it were one and has but one desire to calibrate (Rousseau’s general will). However essential this idea was to the French and American Revolutions and their (ongoing) anticolonial and socialist avatars, it is not one Deleuze shares. For him the utopianism of “the people” cannot prevent its essentialization into populism, romanticism, or totalitarianism. What a Deleuzian concept of the people does instead is subtract it from place, state, ethnos, and even demos. A Deleuzian people is a passage through the earth, not a rooting in the soil. It is the invention of a new collectivity, a revolution, with that difference that it does not ever desire a state. The artist Paul Klee once said that through his art he tried to “compulsively fly from the earth,” and that he “seeks a people” (ATP 337). He said that “the people is what is most lacking” (ATP 346). Deleuze makes a political formula from this strange statement. A people is the opposite of a population. Or, rather, there is no sense theorizing population as territorialized by the state without also elaborating a concept of the people or the masses who are in principle capable of rising up against and across it. One of Deleuze’s contributions to the revolutionary tradition, then, is to conceive of the relationship between population and people, or striation and movement, as futural or virtual. What the liberal and socialist concepts of the people assume is that the people preexists its emancipation. This essentialism doesn’t match the reality of flow, especially in today’s networked capitalism. Deleuze follows Virilio here to argue that control is now both molecular and planetary, so that revolutionary combat has to become smooth just like poetry inhabits the striations of a language community. The poet “is one who lets loose molecular populations in hopes that this will sow the seeds of, or even engender, the people to come, that these populations will pass into a people to come, open a cosmos” (ATP 345). It may come as a surprise to learn the deeper inspiration of Deleuze’s radicalization of the people concept is precisely one that early-modern philosophers wanted to be done with: the bible. We saw in the last chapter that the notion of a “new earth” drives the eschatology in many religions. “For, behold, I create new heavens

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and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind” (Isaiah 65:17). Christianity’s universality and militant hope in redemption through Christ, from its earliest days onwards, is predicated on the notion of the new and the to-come. Karl Löwith (1949) summarizes a progression of thinkers from Augustine to Nietzsche and Lenin to argue that the secular concepts of progress and the future would not have emerged were it not for the messianic belief in the simultaneous end of this world and the rebirth of a new world. While Deleuze disagrees fundamentally with the historicist framework for recognizing one’s own age in the past, he is as committed to thinking futurity as Löwith. The to-come (à venir) has again become a prominent theoretical trope around the turn of the twentieth century together with a theological turn in recent secular theorizing. In temporal terms the to-come exists only as a wager within the present that the future could allow justice, democracy, or community to arrive. But where will the newness come? Deleuze’s concept of the people is spatial as much as it is temporal and, like his concept of the earth, radically immanent. The affective force emitted from an innovative art like Klee’s or Artaud’s has nothing sacred or ineffable about it. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition succeeds in theorizing the difference that something makes on its own accord, without the help of a fundamentally unknowable plane of transcendence. Similarly, the people is a potentiality of the population itself, insofar as the latter is a heterogeneous multiplicity that is yielding becomingsminoritarian as expressed in art and philosophy. The to-come is already coming, not forever deferred as in messianism. Becoming is discovering how the to-come inheres in the here and now. Furthermore, there are no religious, racial, class, or folkloric elements through which a people-to-come could be recognized. It cannot be recognized at all, only invented, and reinvented with every creative act. As Deleuze says in his talk “What is the creative act?” such an act has to be an act of resistance against the ubiquitousness of information and communication. The talk ends with the statement “There is no work of art that does not call on a people who does not yet exist” (TRM 324). A few examples of people-to-come in art show that Deleuze is far from singling out the avant-garde as the only or best site where futural collectives can be conjured. Kafka is Deleuze and Guattari’s favorite example of an artist who wrote for a people to come and

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thereby effected an unprecedented arc of becoming away from nation-state and community. Written in German by a Jew in Czechoslovakia brought up Yiddish-speaking, Kafka’s is a “minor literature” not simply for springing forth from hybridity but for its conjuring of future becomings. Kafka wages a subtle kind of battle with the actual majorities and minorities of Europe, raising the provocation “How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?” (K 19). Furthermore, his greatness includes that he became quite popular, creating a new transnational audience and turning discrimination and nonbelonging into an affirmation of transversal collectivity. “The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern” (K 17–18). Minor art is directly revolutionary because it deterritorializes a majority discourse or aesthetic from within at the same time that it changes the relationships amongst minorities. From this perspective the redefinition of Euro-American modernism in bebop and free jazz is more revolutionary than the more explicit blackness and realness of hip-hop. As we will see in the next chapter, the place of becoming-minoritarian is not the ghetto but the reinvention of the distribution of places itself, which in the case of US racism would have to extensively disturb the white majority. There can be minoritarian movements or molecular collectivities within a mainstream work of art. For example, on the lyrical and emotional strata there is in Mahler’s quasi-symphony “The Song of the Earth” a typical romantic yearning for solitude with nature and wholeness. But in the Abécédaire, Deleuze says the piece captures minoritarian becomings as well, working through all the little refrains or ritornellos that populate it (refrains are dealt with in the next chapter). Such little refrains are not of any one nation or continent or even diaspora (note that Mahler was also Jewish), and according to Deleuze their imaginary power have yet to be developed by audiences (ABC O for opera). “The earth” comes to stand for an infinite reservoir of inspirations for collectivities yet to come. In the cinema books Deleuze shows how “national cinema” emerges from making landscapes and bodies recognizable. In national cinemas “the people are already there,” whether in propaganda like The Birth of a Nation (Griffith’s epic about the US Civil War) and

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October (Eisenstein’s epic about the Russian Revolution) or in entertainment like westerns and Bollywood. For Deleuze, cinematic autonomy is achieved when films imagine people without origin and definite characteristics. This can be accomplished in radical thirdworld and black cinema precisely because of majoritarian oppression. “The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here’, the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute” (C2 217). (One would have to elaborate on how cinema engages with the fundamental myth founding settler-colonial societies like the USA , Australia, and Israel of the empty earth, terra nullius, before the arrival of civilization.) If it is good, third-world cinema struggles on the level of the medium itself. Its stories and imagery are not of communities recognizable in the global faciality machine. Rather, “because the people are missing, the author is in a situation of producing utterances which are already collective, which are like the seeds of the people to come, and whose political impact is immediate and inescapable” (C2 221). Cinema becomes more directly “political” as it manages to avoid populism and to stir populations across the boundaries imposed by and for colonialism. The politics of (a) people-to-come is indispensable for Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to population. The Deleuzian concept of the people delinks it from the concepts of sovereignty and nation with which it has usually been entwined and grounds it instead in the reinvention of collectivity. Unlike other empirical populations Deleuze and Guattari speak of, the people-to-come is an abstract promise that must be made true. Its invocation already demands to be revised in a next creative act. Presumably Deleuze writes only about people-to-come in art because an actual popular uprising and sustained resistance require circumscribing a tentative collectivity and a territory in whose names they take place. Is the to-come then placeless, utopian? Is Deleuze’s notion of the future (avenir), the tocome (à venir), the not-yet, messianic after all? With Badiou’s critique in mind, it might seem that Deleuze aestheticizes politics. However, the resulting political sense of art can catalyze the transformation of social conditions into revolution. While it is true that Deleuze offers little guidance as to how the global left could reignite the “general will” again as happened in 1968 or the beginning of the twentieth century, such criticism doesn’t fully address the originality of his

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thinking. And much of that originality comes from insisting the history of peoples is always also an imaginative geography.

Capital The financial collapse of 2007–08 and the following recession and political turmoil bring home both Marx’s basic message about the capitalist system and Freud’s about the unconscious: what you see around you – elections, house, kiwi fruit, your iPhone – is spun from an immense realm that keeps itself invisible, unless it’s in trouble. The system will successfully adjust itself during crises, until communism can overthrow it. Deleuze and Guattari’s political economy starts, like Marx’s, with the most massive and restless flow, the one that makes the world go round: money. They emphasize money’s axiomatic, deterritorializing, and ultimately psychotic aspects, which the compound crises of the present are bringing out as never before. In fact, in this section we will see how capital is more central to Deleuze’s thinking than is usually recognized.

Axioms In Capital Marx (1992) develops a theory of money as process not thing. Money is an instrument for the accumulation of more money and power for capitalists by exploiting and befuddling the wagelaborer. After Deleuze one should go further and suggest money is an immense alien life-force turning all its owners and spenders into automatons. The capitalist axiomatic is absolutely “worldwide” insofar as it tends to conquer the entire planet and beyond, always jumping on the best rides available, including those of state communism and the third world (ATP 455–56). Axioms are simple utilitarian mechanisms targeting highly specific flows and places. They are not regulations or contracts agreed upon by bosses or heads of states but more like cybernetic functions. Axioms inhere in capital itself, to which states, companies, and workers-consumers have to comply. Like in mathematics, the axioms of capitalism seem self-evident. Marx reconciles capital as a shifting relationship between aggregates of workers and aggregates of capitalists. The inherent

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spatiality of this relationship has been studied extensively in Marxist geography (Harvey 2011, Smith 2008). Capital is highly mobile, while labor markets are far more constrained to locality; cities and sectors where capital is put to profitable use attract flows of workers and more capital (London, Silicon Valley, and Shenzhen being some paradigmatic examples); unemployment and poverty are necessarily produced in areas not on capital’s radar; the intense internationalization of production since the 1970s has increased the power of a corporate jet set, which is no longer only white; workers’ struggles have never attained the global momentum necessary for changing this system. Deleuze agrees with all this but he is less interested in thinking a relation between capital and labor (an inheritance of Hegel in Marx) than the intersection of flows of monetary and labor-power themselves. What he abstracts is not relationality but fluidity. Capital is money that must flow. Capital holds its possessor hostage in order to accrue exponentially. From 5 trillion dollars after the Second World War to 55 trillion in 2008 and a projected (that is, needed) 100 trillion in 2030, the total volume of actual capital madly augments itself without knowing where it could be spent (Harvey 2011: 27). A capitalist cannot choose not to compete or he goes under. Competing means continually looking for ways to reinvest profits so they (hopefully) offset increasing debts. All governments and cities likewise push for annual GDP increases of about 3 percent. Hence accumulation under capitalism strongly tends to be overaccumulation. The unproductive excess has to be rechannelled into new markets, especially colonial and infrastructure projects, for which violence is not shunned. Much of David Harvey’s work is about how landscapes are altered by the flooding or paucity of capital markets. The massive construction of railways, factories, canals, ports, boulevards, sewers, skyscrapers, suburbs, malls, resorts, telecommunications, and casinos is the landscapification of capital, which cannot sit idle. When physical landscapes cannot suck up any more, capital makes itself productive. The finance sector’s ascendency – the global derivatives market alone is now thought to be worth some $1.2 quadrillion – has since the 1970s been the “solution” to the Euro-American industrial crisis. The “capital surplus absorption problem” (Harvey 2011: 26) can be understood as a problem in the sense of Difference and Repetition, as an imperfectly resolvable virtual tension permeating

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a system to which actual arrangements are the evolving answer. The geological and ecological problems of resources and the corporate problem of overaccumulation conjoin to form the basic problem of pure quantitative excess searching for an outlet. Briefly following Althusser, Deleuze reinterprets Marx’s often-maligned economism: “In all rigour, there are only economic social problems, even though the solutions may be juridical, political or ideological, and the problems may be expressed in these fields of resolvability,” which “is why ‘the economic’ is never given properly speaking, but rather designates a differential virtuality to be interpreted” (DR 186). Social formations are defined by their structure in the Althusserian sense, a set of disparities of ownership and power, itself one (bad) solution to the conundrum of too much fluidity. Ideological practices then hide the absurdity of the system’s fundamental problematic. “While it is in the nature of consciousness to be false, problems by their nature escape consciousness” (DR 208). In Difference and Repetition Deleuze does not yet define capitalism through the basic problem of surplus absorption but in Anti-Oedipus it is abundantly clear that the engine of modern civilization is money, which aggressively unhinges itself and sweeps up everything from other social formations. Money x yields more money x + dx where d comes from the exploitation of labor-power as the main source of profits. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the “filiative” quasi-biblical retroaction of capital (money “begets” more money, Marx’s M-Mʹ) emerges through a “surplus value of flux” (AO 228). It is this self-propelling inhuman nature of capital that they call “axiomatic” in the mathematical sense, requiring no proof yet enabling endless further formal elaboration. The origin of this axiomatic approach lies in Euclid, whose pure approach to space has, according to Deleuze and Guattari, for millennia allowed state power to expand and densify (ATP 489). Mathematical operations, like the grid or expressing values as quantities, become perfected and even more abstract under capitalism. A capitalist axiom is an impersonal, seemingly incontestable program for making new profit. Markets become axiomatized with breathtaking speed and flexibility. Deleuze and Guattari stress the functionality as opposed to ideology of the way capital decodes and codes things to sell. New axioms continually increase capital’s territorial and stratal reach, gushing into everything from opium wars to cruise ships and

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dating sites. “An axiom will be found even for the language of dolphins” (AO 238). While Harvey stresses the finite capacity of terrestrial life to soak up capital’s hyperfluidity, for Deleuze and Guattari there seems to be no inbuilt limit. “If capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies, this is because capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it” (AO 230–31). Or again: “Capitalism is indeed an axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones. . . capitalism confronts its own limits and simultaneously displaces them, setting them down again farther along” (ATP 463). The very catastrophes resulting from capitalism like anthropogenic climate change and famine are themselves further business opportunities. Deleuze and Guattari mostly dodge the traditional discussions about the falling rates of profit and capitalism’s fundamental contradictions, but they agree with Marx that axioms thrive in war and crisis. And capital’s stupendous creativity in “overcoming its limits” should be understood both geographically and transcendentally. Capital is its own ground, and the sky was never its limit. But Deleuze and Guattari are not pessimists. In fact more than Marx, their entire effort is to affirm that the flows of people, desires, and sciences deterritorialized by the capitalist axiomatic can be reorganized against it by following a different, non-utilitarian logic. In critiquing quantification and axiomatics, Deleuze and Guattari also mean to oppose the reductionism so dominant in bourgeois thought, especially cognitive science and analytic philosophy. Mathematics is central to capital’s colonization of the earth. Deleuze is not against formalization as such, or he wouldn’t have read Spinoza’s Euclidian prose (1996), but the stylistic contrast between A Thousand Plateaus and the hegemonic rigor of mainstream philosophy cannot be greater. Does he thereby lose the opportunity to engage logical and mathematical discourse for more revolutionary ends? We have seen Deleuze’s most worthy philosophical opponent, Badiou (2005), explicitly embraces the axiomatic method of mathematical set theory in order to subvert it towards revolutionary change. Following Lacan, Badiou pushes materialism into an antiempiricist trajectory. But the price of Badiou’s axiomatic approach is that it becomes delinked from political economy, political ecology, and urban studies. If one is dedicated to “believing in the world” perhaps this price is too high. For Deleuze and Guattari any

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countercartography has to start with questioning the false purifications and fixities underlying dominant discourses.

Deterritorialization For orthodox Marxism it is the antagonistic relation between ruling and working class that drives history. For Deleuze and Guattari class is important but secondary to capital. As mentioned, Capitalism and Schizophrenia adopts a non-evolutionist framework of three modes of production (savage, despotic, capitalist) in which a social formation coheres through its principal deterritorializing force. For archaic empires this is writing; in primitive societies it is the movements of animals, plants, and their spirits; in capitalism it is money. Imperial despotism and primitive magic are not stages superseded in the progressive movement towards capitalism and communism but are retained and given new functions. For Deleuze and Guattari money was not invented for exchange as the mainstream tradition has it, but initially flowed as tax from subject populations to despot, consolidating his territorial power (ATP 442–43). As it intermingled with flows of commodities, and especially after it encountered flows of itinerant labor-power, money escaped its imperial form and became capital. There is no objective class enemy of the people, but a far less localizable vector of deterritorialization full of political ambiguity. Unlike the emphasis on the alienations of industrial labor amongst many Marxists, the rejoinder of Anti-Oedipus to the Althusserian “return to Marx” is squarely a return to the theory of money (see AO 230). But more than Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari argue that circulation necessarily involves chimera and whim. The truth of money is never found in rational behavior. Building on Nietzsche’s idea of the originary indebtedness that structures society, no production takes place without increasingly mad cycles of debt. In capitalism, “bank credit effects a demonetization or dematerialization of money” (AO 229). Since the 1980s debt has become astronomical, a world total of some 200 trillion dollars at the time of writing. The becoming-fictitious or -ethereal of value is the strongest instance of the deterritorialization that is capitalism. Mathematical wizardry is used for financializing ever larger swaths of people’s lives. As alien superorganism capital becomes ever more

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malignant – and myopic – seducing even social-democrats like Mitterrand and Blair to gradually remove all barriers to its cryptocriminal movements, and creating ever more markets on the ruins of the welfare state. Since the finance collapse of 2007–08 the axioms of neoliberalism have been tainted somewhat by the unemployment and political impasses they created, but other axioms are taking their place. Deleuze and Guattari’s political economy is at its best when describing how capital penetrates, dismantles, and conjoins all other flows and meanings so that it can keep on flowing and growing. Following Marx, unlike all previous social formations the “socius” (virtual plane of social organization) of capitalism encompasses the planet because it emerged from two unmoored and quantifiable flows in the first place. Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flow of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flow of labor in the form of the “free worker”. Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. AO 33, emphasis added Exploitation by way of abstracting value is not transhistorical. It was fought for by a nascent mercantile class in the contingent geographies of late-feudal Europe. As Marx belabors to argue, capital did not create its initial conditions. But once it emerged it started to retroactively enhance its own conditions of possibility. Capital never succeeds in fully controlling what it capitalizes on, which is precisely why it is so deterritorializing, always running behind what it unleashes. What exactly happens when money deterritorializes a thing, landscape, or human body? First, it attaches an abstract quantity, a price, which brackets all material singularity. We no longer have a unique thing but a commodity interchangeable with millions of others. Hence, and this is the second, more explicitly geographical aspect of deterritorialization, it can be sent and exchanged anywhere

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money is used. A vast system of differential relations between prices ensues, entailing competition, stock, and currency markets, and spatial divisions of labor, the latter because capital flows where labor is cheapest. Unlike the emphasis on meaning in cultural studies, Deleuze and Guattari stress the unprecedented force of pure quantity under capitalism. Capital does away with all transcendence except that of quantitative equivalence. Capital is meaningless selfmultiplication scrambling all regal or artisanal codes (feudalism and despotism), doing away with the laws set by ancestors and local animal spirits (savage society), unless these can patented too. Third, a commodity flow has to encounter its consumers, a problem that itself brings about huge industries. As long as this happens, flows can grow indefinitely (the flows of Coca Cola). Capital manipulates the law and consumer desires at regular intervals (deregulation, McDonald’s veggie burgers, Apple’s annual product launch). Altogether, flow and desire under capitalism are too evanescent for a ruling class to control. Control happens, but it does not emanate from one class or sector. Money’s deterritorialization is like an occult forcefulness. Capital’s flight through strata is unstoppable, sending value from the depths of the oceans to skyscrapers and satellites. Since its beginnings in the Mediterranean, capital invested in transport and communication technologies to speed up its own deterritorialization. What Harvey calls time–space compression – the time needed to conquer distance is objectively compressed hence space is subjectively compressed along with it – was neglected by most Marxist theorists. In Deleuze– Guattarian political economy, on the contrary, the concept of deterritorialization holds that the compression and dilation of capital is essential in the irreversible modifications of the earth’s crust, which we call globalization. Fourth, while those with profits to reinvest determine where tolerable life is available, it is ultimately the working body that creates their profits. The smooth flow of capital depends on disciplining and appeasing fundamentally unreliable labor-power. Deleuze and Guattari often note that unions and nonprofit organizations, just like the USSR and parliamentary “socialists,” all tend to participate in this docile productivism. Emphasized by the autonomist currents of Italian Marxism revolving around Negri, with which Deleuze and Guattari keenly interacted, perhaps the

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working class can block the exploitative mobility of capital only by refusing work as we know it altogether.

World-systems Deleuze and Guattari’s reliance on world-systems theory is seldom noted. Building on Marx and Braudel but further inspired by anticolonial struggles, world-systems theory as formulated by Samir Amin (1976), Deleuze and Guattari’s main inspiration, and Immanuel Wallerstein, its key proponent, analyzes the long-term interconnections underpinning the shifts in global and regional hegemony. The dominance of a core or center is contingent on the provision of raw material, labor, and consumers from peripheral states, often colonies or ex-colonies. In the 1980s a semiperiphery arose comprising states like Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan, while China and India are now fast evolving from peripheral to central status. There is but one capitalist world-system, which “tolerates, in fact requires, a certain peripheral polymorphy, to the extent that it is not saturated, to the extent that it actively repels its own limits” (ATP 436). Far from proving free trade brings wellbeing to all, the collapse of state communism, the resurgence of nationalist protectionism, and Asian growth are simply capital’s continued quest for exploitable landscapes and bodies. The only explicit criticism Deleuze and Guattari make of world-systems theory is that it forgets stratification within the West, or what is sometimes called the fourth world, people “abandoned to erratic work (subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy)” (ATP 469; we come back to urban inequality in the next chapter). As US hegemony started to appear doomed already in the mid1970s, capital’s axiomatic creativity allowed it to start rearranging the North/South polarity globally (see ATP 566n23). Evidently capital has no special fondness for white people. As we saw at the end of the previous chapter, Deleuze has great interest in a question fundamental to both post-Braudelian comparative history and, at the beginning of capitalism’s adventure, Hegel: why did Europe become dominant? “The only universal history is the history of contingency. Let us return to this eminently contingent question that modern historians know how to ask: why Europe, why not China?” (AO 224). While shipping in other civilizations supported

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commerce and despotic territoriality, Western Europeans developed the mad desire to cross the oceans and subdue populations. Capitalism proper requires a singular kind of adventurous zeal to extend the new conjunction of capital and labor flows. Closely following Marx, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the flows of commodities, technology, industry, money, and armies through China, India, or the Roman Empire were not allowed to “stream together” (ATP 452). Capitalism only appears where and when labor is deterritorialized from serfdom and village, and capital from land and market square. The two flows are “conjugated” through the comparability granted by a uniform system of prices (including wages) and exchange rates. Conjugation is what capitalist flow is all about, from the machinic entangling of money, raw materials, tools, invention, and labor-power in eighteenth-century Lancashire to the computerized stock markets today. The new highly lucrative form of exploitation of industrial labor rapidly diffused by conjugating (deterritorializing) one market after another, so that Marx and Engels would in five decades talk of one economic worldsystem. Globalization was of course an old dream of some emperors and holy men across the world, but it was only industrial wagelabor, financed through previously accumulated mercantile wealth, that could kickstart this runaway process. Unlike the territorial morphology of antiquities and feudalisms, capital strives to absorb and overcode all political entities of the world. Now “we can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States, forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto supranational power untouched by governmental decisions” (ATP 453). However, states have always been crucial for providing infrastructure and laying down axioms conducive to capital flow, especially through war and technology. For Marx (1992: part 8), of course, the “primitive accumulation” by states on the basis of dispossessing colonized populations was in hindsight another necessary territorializing project for capitalism to take off. Deleuze and Guattari push this further: “there is a violence that necessarily operates through the State, precedes the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the ‘primitive accumulation’, and makes possible the capitalist mode of production itself” (ATP 447). A long passage in A Thousand Plateaus locates the origins of geographical

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inequality in the extortion practices of ancient empires (437–47). The mere fact that agriculture produces a flow of surplus that has to be siphoned and distributed creates wealth for those who capture it. A state is in fact nothing but an “apparatus of capture.” The despot invents a new kind of arithmetic, money, in order to seize rent and tribute and, from around the sixteenth century, profits from trade and manufacturing. For thousands of years, therefore, the state machine has involved a “general space of comparison and a mobile center of appropriation” (444). Deleuze and Guattari make the startling claim that any sedentary society is already urban, stockpiling by exploiting many peripherals at once (440). In retrospect, but only in retrospect, the state, the city, and capitalism were and are tangible in nomadic and agricultural societies as transcendental limits in both the mathematical and geographic sense. These limits were actively staved off as undesirable by the nomads and savages. It is as if they presaged the global catastrophes of our twenty-first century. When in early-modern Atlantic Europe peasants were dispossessed and capital was increasingly available from long-distance trade and slave labor, the “space of comparison” of the state enabled a mode of homogenizing populations and markets. In the process exploitation became untied from the body of the despot, but the spatial logic of social stratification (central wealth, poor peripheries) remained in place. While for Deleuze and Guattari money originally propped the state and concomitant caste distinctions, capitalist axiomatics dramatically transforms the essence of production, exchange, and institutions. Without understanding capital flows and the complex desires sustaining them, the differentiation into rich and poor tends to be explained in moral instead of systemic terms: the greed for power and possession of individuals instead of the outcome of a distributive logic. Deleuze and Guattari do not locate the basis of injustice in the use of money or debt as an instrument of power but in the circulation of money itself. Under capitalism circulation becomes uncontrollable by any one agent, unmappable by any one intelligence. Ultimately Deleuze–Guattarian political economy breaks with the binary of center and periphery. The global economic system is a network of networks with shifting gradients of economic power. Capital flows become viscous in finance hubs like Frankfurt and manufacturing hubs like Ciudad Juárez and thereby bypass countless other places. Capitalist world-space is far too uneven,

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volatile, and cramped to fit a bipolarity. As Massey (2005) has shown definitively, it is the differential connectedness of a place, not its prior centrality or peripherality, that determines its capacity to attract and steer further flows. This happens at all scales, not just states and regions, and the differences far exceed what the human sciences usually pick up on. World-systems theory is on the right track with its geohistories of European dominance and Global South poverty over the longue durée but the center–periphery polarity prevents it from examining inequalities on all strata. Meanwhile it is fair to say Deleuze and Guattari have no theory of place and spatial fix as such – how is machinic surplus reterritorialized in one place and not another? They could be criticized for the tendency, common to philosophers, of abstracting the geographies of money and commodity chains into a homogeneous becomingplanetary as if place no longer matters. But because they accept the premises of world-systems theory, there can at least be the start of a philosophy of globalization attentive to the real differences from which capitalism ensues.

Schizophrenia A last theoretical innovation in Deleuze–Guattarian economic geography is its argument that the axiomatic commands not only production and circulation, but also a particular subjection or subjectification, which however also potentially harbors a subjectivation, a politics. Commodity fetishism, the retrieval of archaic affective registers to bestow an addictive allure to products and services, becomes ever more neurotically geared to work, competition, and enjoyment. Ultimately the spatiotemporal rhythms of human bodies are orchestrated by the movements of capital. Guattari does not shy away from calling this situation machinic enslavement (e.g. MU 40, ATP 458). Often, noting television reduces humans to mere exchangeable quanta of input and output, Guattari (e.g. SS 236) was quite prophetic about the extent bodies are today commanded 24/7 to generate surplus value. Distinctions between work and leisure collapse. Bodies are literally suspended in flows of images and data, fantasies of holidaying and sexual omnipotence, mixed with perpetual anxiety of falling behind. Bodies produce value simply by being alive.

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Anti-Oedipus refines the Marxist theory of ideology. The book’s central question is one that has always driven political philosophy and psychoanalysis: why do people desire their own enslavement? More specifically, how does capital “buy” the docility of billions of bodies? But if inequalities within and between countries are justified “ideologically,” through the representations of television and blogs for example (which can be analyzed with discourse analysis, semiotics, and so on), they are reinforced much more directly through bodily practice and the senses. Whether rich or poor, all people love handling cash, seeing returns on their investments, fondling new gadgets. Rather than money “representing” shit, as Freud said, money and shit are interchangeable flows within the same libidinal economy (AO 28–29, 302). “It is at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved” (AO 239). Some readers conclude that Deleuzian affect and the Guattarian machinic seek to overcome the economic reductionism of the Althusserian theory of ideology. But by underscoring the nonrepresentational and pathological nature of capitalist biopower, Deleuze and Guattari in fact offer the strongest concept yet of ideology: it is no longer the distortion of an otherwise stable social reality but the conscious embracing of its cumulative potentialities. This perspective on machinic enslavement yields a far richer spatial appreciation of how ideological processes work. Physically slotted into machines like cars, offices, call centers, theme parks, casinos, and Facebook, bodies have no illusion that they are being abused for making money for an invisible global oligarchy. It is just that sheer enjoyment makes them actively hostile to exploring how to interrupt this situation. Unlike the pessimism of the Frankfurt School, however, Deleuze and Guattari place a carefully qualified hope in the many subtle molecular ways in which desire for radical change lurks even beneath the most insipid of suburban households. The deterritorialization and scrambling of traditional cultural codes alienates to the extent that there is a societal bottom-line Deleuze and Guattari say is psychotic. For Lacan psychosis is the untying of what holds signification together in a subject whose desire is then no longer barred by paternal prohibition. It is the most disturbing experience possible. Deleuze and Guattari airlift the term schizophrenia (the mental disorder prone to psychoses) from psychiatry to mean the generalized breakdown of meaning

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intrinsic to capitalism. When identities and history lose footing, delirium and hallucination take over. There are artistic and intellectual movements that deliberately play with this psychedelic and psychotic aspect of accelerating capitalism, from Baudelaire to Artaud to postmodernism. Schizophrenia is the limit condition against which capitalism as system continually brushes. In both Marxism and Deleuze and Guattari, this “limit” is always both geographical and psychocultural. The irreverent revalidation of schizos in Anti-Oedipus has to be distinguished from later postmodernism and should be seen in the light of Guattari’s critiques in the 1960s of psychoanalysis’s focus on neurosis and disciplining. But “schizoanalysis” led to many misunderstandings. Deleuze seems to have abandoned this term in the 1980s while Guattari continued refining it all the way to his last major book, Schizoanalytic Cartographies. What is important to note is that for both Guattari and Deleuze, it makes no sense to analyze the geography of money without analyzing the strata of the unconscious and everyday spaces through which money can flow and bodies are enslaved. What Capitalism and Schizophrenia argues is that only a certain madness can be structurally adequate to the spiraling, inhuman speeds of money as capital. The psychological condition of our mode of production is not reason and freedom but deterritorialization and the desperate attempt at control. This makes the presence of territories – or places as we will discuss them in Chapter 3 – all the more important to theorize.

War Any study of the deep origins of the “world order” has to note the ineradicable role that violence plays in organizing human space from the beginnings of the species. Neither 1945 nor 1989 brought an end to the arms race, systematic bloodshed, and mass fear. Deleuze would have been horrified to see the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent “war on terror” and US -led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq create a worldwide spiral of violence and fear, spurred on by microfascisms aiming towards a final clash of civilizations. Geopolitics is driven by a self-replicating diagram of war, and brute economic interests are habitually hidden behind liberal, humanitarian, and theological spin. Ultimately war is but

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another axiom of capitalism. Before addressing how Deleuze turns this dire predicament into an ethics and a politics, however, we should take a step back and understand his approach to speed, the most important element in the ecology of warfare.

Speeds At the metaphysical level Deleuze inherits a keen interest in the “physics of bodies” (EPS 260) from Spinoza’s theory of affect. “Body” here must be understood as it is in classical physics, as some thing, including a human body, a fluid, a sound, or a system. Social formations are constituted by positive feedback loops of an immense number and diversity of physical bodies moving together. For Spinoza (1996: 41 i.e. IIP 13), as we will see in the next chapter, bodies differ from one another in terms of “motion and rest.” Each body has a different configuration of vibrations, circulations, and exchanges. There are more speeds in an ant, and more slownesses in a pebble. When Deleuze says a body or assemblage is “defined by” the speeds that compose it he is not comparing movements across Cartesian space, but theorizing how intensive speeds constitute a body’s capacities to affect and be affected. A body moves and feels by dipping into Spinoza’s “substance,” God-or-Nature, what Deleuze calls the plane of immanence, which is ever-changing yet autonomous: “a plane upon which everything is laid out, and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all functions; its dimensions, however, increase with those of the multiplicities of individualities it cuts across. It is a fixed plane, upon which things are distinguished from one another only by speed and slowness” (ATP 254). The phrase “speeds and slownesses” runs through A Thousand Plateaus. It signals an understanding of movements as aggregative and interactive. Obviously under globalization the plane of immanence increases its “dimensions” with every commodity and sign traversing it. Indeed, capitalism’s densifying web of speeds, exemplified by the quasi-material cloud of ubiquitously downloadable data, is GodNature’s supreme engine of immanent production. In addition to Spinoza, the inspiration for the nomadological emphasis on velocity comes from the architectural theorist Paul Virilio. Virilio (1977) points out that as a rule the acceleration of life is pioneered by the military (shipping, planes, computers,

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internet). Even before money or cities there were bands of warriors. If, as we saw, money was invented for taxation most of it goes into conquest, administrative centralization, and the maintenance of what is called law and order. The colonization of territories and populations happens not by technology as such, but its speeds. The essence of war is speed, said Sun Tzu already, and all strategists plotting the rhythms and vectors of battle show he was correct. Ballistics has always been central to warfare and the improvements in precision, range, detonation power, visibility, and discipline haven’t changed that: “the weapon invents speed, or the discovery of speed invents the weapon (the projective character of weapons is the result)” (ATP 395). States are driven not by interests or ideologies but by a geo-power based on the complementarity between weapons and technological sophistication. War makes social formations fragment and coalesce. Deleuze and Guattari call Virilio their favorite among authors with “an apocalyptic or millenarian sense” (ATP 467), but he is easily misunderstood if he is taken to mean that governance by destructive speed – what he calls dromocracy – is actual and complete. Dromocracy is a tendency linked to a death drive and changes with the conditions in which it becomes dominant. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the twin imperatives of growth and acceleration make catastrophe each year more likely and frequent, but too much disaster would bring down the system. In any case, more potential for disaster demands more militarization and commodification (insurance) in an ever tighter spiral, bringing ever closer the apocalyptic and racialized scenarios of network failure, peak oil, earthquake zones, climate displacement, overcrowding, the extinction of entire genera, pandemics, famine, terrorism, genocide, and exodus. But Virilio’s insistence on acceleration is the reflex of a conservative thinker, and he misses what is new about modernity. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that in the last few centuries it is capital not military technology as such that pushes and requires ever more dromocratization. The generalization of a preparedness for war is especially constitutive of capitalism only because it exacerbates the conditions of scarcity requiring defense and attack strategies in the first place. We have seen that for Deleuze and Guattari information society perfects a machinic enslavement in the service of capital. But ships, cars, and airplanes are also integral to capitalism’s segregative effects

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and accumulation. When it comes to speeds it is strange but typical of philosophy that Deleuze and Guattari seldom mention modern mobility except for a few nods here and there. In Soft Subversions Guattari cites Virilio’s vision of the huge majority being fixed in place on earth while the few whizz around it (SS 27). Later on he lists three components of social hierarchy under capitalism, “social resources” like education, the mass media and “modern means of transportation, which don’t serve exclusively to take people to work, but also transform archaic territorialities, to split up geopolitical space, to permit the mobility of one segment of the population and prohibit that of another” (SS 47). As Marx famously foretold, capital through transport technologies continually demolishes the boundaries of communities, empires, and “races,” what Guattari calls archaic territorialities. Geopolitics is done partially by controlling transport. Moreover, there is a direct connection between one segment’s slowness and another’s speeds (the next chapter will return to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of segmentarity). Massey (2005) has explained how there is relative (im) mobilization of people under the otherwise celebrated process of globalization. Guattari adds the dimension of desire. Machinic mobility, like television, lulls people into a consumerist slumber, and the difference between mobility and video is narrowing. But he also always insists that there are possibilities for molecular revolutions concealed everywhere in the social fabric precisely because it is changing so fast. We do not have the same relations to reading, writing, images, [urban] space, sex, the body, the night, the sun, pain, as we only had ten years ago. Profound and irreversible mutations are underway in all these areas. In other words, the molecular substratum on which all large social collectivities are inscribed has become a sort of bubbling soup, a “machinic soup” [. . .] [We need to aim] towards the construction of new social war machines, which will themselves forge their own support creating a new kind of social praxis. SS 29–30 The ecology of speeds that Guattari offers allows understanding not just socioeconomic inequality, militarism, and machinic enslavement, but he also affirms the possibility of re-engaging

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speeds towards reconstituting society through forging new bellicose units.

War-machines The main source for Deleuze’s approach to war is the nomads plateau. Published separately in English as Nomadology: The War Machine, this “treatise” is a twist on the monadology of Leibniz (1898), but instead of every individual monad reflecting the cosmic whole in a statically harmonious way, the flux and fragments of nomadic movement irreversibly stir up social formations. Parodying Euclid’s axioms, the plateau blends myth and epistemology with military and technological history to make the organization of space fundamental to a transhistorical or even transcendental concept of the political. Central is the initially puzzling concept of the war-machine, a technosocial arrangement bent on speed and undetectability. We have seen how it is war’s inhuman propensity to speed and spatial control that has enabled it to become so defining of geopolitical order. The history of power has been the history of the logistics of acceleration, which is ultimately the capacity to kill. Virilio is at his best when debunking the hypocrisies of the humanist discourse of peace, which itself perpetuates war. According to Deleuze and Guattari, he demonstrates five rigorous points: that the war machine finds its new object in the absolute peace of terror or deterrence; that it performs a technoscientific “capitalization”; that this war machine is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed; that this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the “unspecified enemy”, domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world); that there arose from this a new conception of security as materialized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed catastrophe. ATP 467

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This summary gives a good prediction of twenty-first century geoand biopolitics through Virilio’s apocalypticism. (To be clear, “war machine” in this quote means the military-industrial complex as axiom of capitalism.) The militarization of society under the Cold War already created the conditions for the overall securitization that was to become instituted under neoliberalism, the war on terror, and the Anthropocene. The “very special kind of peace” that terrifies populations into submission is nothing but the oft-noted “culture of fear” characterizing a world of increasing risk. The interpenetrating geographies in this quote develop what AntiOedipus calls the paranoiac pole of capitalist civilization as opposed to its schizophrenic one (AO 376). Under the Cold War the enemy was fixed quite rigidly in space, veritable Worlds separated by an Iron Curtain. Today the perception of threats becomes distributed across all spheres of life. Instead of the molar oppositions East versus West, Deleuze and Guattari argue there is just one world, the world of capital, which is internally split and re-split as insecurities multiply. With the becoming-nebulous of “enemies,” hence of “friends,” not only can the target of securitization be anything, anywhere – refugees, germs, emails, pedophiles, backpackers, anarchists, hallucinogens – but everyone is compelled to participate in surveilling. If you see something suspicious, say something™. (Yes, this slogan from the US Department of Homeland Security is trademarked.) With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that technoscientific capitalism would dismantle state communism. Capital inherently aims towards one planetary space of 24/7 sensibilization to risk, programmed by the very machines supposed to protect populations. Gradually public space becomes invisibly striated by the axioms of a low-level warfare against the entire population. Deleuze and Guattari are, like Virilio, fascinated by the concept of total war as brought to its crux by the Nazis after 1943 (ATP 420–21). Whereas Blitzkrieg focuses on rapid conquest, in total war there is complete mobilization of troops for offense, production, and public opinion. It is suicidal rather than totalitarian. Here enters a difference between Deleuze–Guattari and Foucault. Even if the concept of biopolitics is crucial for understanding national socialism, Foucault (2003) doesn’t consider power’s perverse taste for apocalypse. The state’s unconscious thirst for self-annihilation can be explained psychoanalytically, but it derives more from inhuman axioms circulating in an overarching diagram inciting people to

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expect, adore, and pay for violence, “a power of destruction, of war, a power incarnated in financial, industrial, and military technological complexes that are in continuity with one another” (ATP 466). Add to this the desire for violence in popular culture, and it is clear that liberal humanism is complicit with certain darker desires that capitalism retrieves from previous modes of production. The importance of war for Deleuze’s perspective on global politics can be seen in his public interventions. Deleuze’s strongest political statements are against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and in favor of the PLO. In an irate letter to Le Monde in 1978, Deleuze explains why it is fundamentally wrong to paint the Palestinian delegation as jeopardizing peace negotiations: they do not have a country with institutions. This is how “an Arab death has neither the same value nor the same impact as the death of an Israeli death” (TRM 161). Israel’s claim to possess the right to an ethnically homogeneous territory perversely reinvents the Nazi concepts of Endlösung and Lebensraum through a quasi-theocratic prism. As Deleuze says, Israel does not even hide its aim: to make refugees of most Palestinians. This project of ethnic cleansing is tacitly supported by the US and the rest of the world. “For a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian question, Israel can count on the almost unanimous complicity of other states (with various nuances and restrictions)” (TRM 161). Of course, as argued in a conversation titled “The Indians of Palestine” (TRM 196–97), the shameful support of the US for Israel comes from the fact that their limit-aim is the same, the settler-colonial expulsion of existing peoples. Deleuze correctly saw in the 1970s that Israel/Palestine lies at the center (that is, it drives the abstract machine) of the world-order. It is not just its obscene cycle of violence, but that Zionist colonization and US imperialism justified by liberal democracy become a military and demographic experiment to be emulated elsewhere. “The IsraelPalestine model is determinant in current problems of terrorism, even in Europe. The worldwide understanding among states and the organization of a world police force with worldwide jurisdiction, currently under way, necessarily lead to an expansion in which more and more people are classified as virtual ‘terrorists’ ” (TRM 162). Deleuze here foresees the Cold War flipping into an amorphous world-order and a planetary society of control. The success today of Israeli high-tech security companies and defense “solutions” should not be surprising.

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Deleuze and Guattari make a highly original intervention (implicitly against Virilio and Foucault) by arguing that power is secondary to the capacity to kill. Power is always territorial, but the capacity to kill has to be highly mobile. Confusingly, the “war machine” the previous quote talks about (the military-industrial complex) is different in kind from the “war-machine,” which I will write with hyphen. A war-machine is a small disciplined pack at the margins of social formations with a singular capacity to fight, roam, and conspire. Examples abound: pirates, bandits, prostitutes, Vikings, ninjas, mercenaries, cowboys, gold diggers, metalworkers, Amazons, urchins, smugglers, stockbrokers, graffiti artists, squatters. Think of the packs of Moses, Jesus, or Lenin. Initially, war-machines cohere through their moving-about at a distance from state and family. But it is precisely their dynamism and militancy that gets them put to use by the repressive projects of states and empires. Deleuze and Guattari make a strict conceptual distinction: the war-machine is exterior even when appropriated by the state (axiom II , ATP 380ff). This is a strictly political move. In stressing the minoritarian, animalistic, antitranscendent origins of the war-machine they conceive means of violence as more than what the law can monopolize. If the territorializing power of the state is parasitic on war-machines, molecular revolution consists in inventing new powers for a different kind of battle. After the state system ingests most of the means of violence from heterogeneous itinerant war machines, the capitalist world-economy (including the state-communist countries) bring forth a new smooth space of one single war machine at the planetary scale. Playing with the confusion they introduced with the term, Deleuze and Guattari write: “the States no longer appropriated the war machine; they reconstituted a war machine of which they themselves were only parts” (ATP 467). The single capitalist War Machine propels itself forward quasi-automatically, escaping diplomacy and rational thought. This is what makes arms races and terrorism so apocalyptic. But the massive securitization invading bodies and landscapes leads to a nihilistic conclusion only if we miss the fundamental point that power as such is distributed, fractal, and ordinary before it becomes genocidal. In notes Deleuze wrote in 1977 for Foucault when the latter was experiencing a crisis, entitled “Desire and pleasure,” Deleuze emphatically declares that they are both interested in the capillary

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flow of power (TRM 122–34). There is a nevertheless a fundamental difference between their political topologies. Deleuze is interested in how this flow is interrupted in and by desire. This is not a celebration of desire as innate, chaotic energy, something Foucault rightly abhors, but the asking of a question Foucault elides: “How can power be desired?” (TRM 125). Seeing power as always but one possible effect of desire then allows for conceptualizing powers as lodged on a “plane of organization,” which is a subset of the plane of consistency. A space for subversive politics is opened within but against the assemblages of biopower. Deleuze gives the example of Archimedian geometry subverting the Euclidian geometry of the Greek city-state (TRM 134). When Foucauldians do not sufficiently distinguish amongst the agents of violence (urban planning? science? media? war?), and refuse to theorize the role of capital, they cannot fully think through the tendency of power to leak and turn against itself. Furthermore, the price Foucault pays for focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that he does not see the technoscientific specificities of the twentieth century. Following Virilio as well as William S. Burroughs in his well-known essay on the societies of control, Deleuze says postwar capitalism displays a power more meticulous than Foucault’s biopower or disciplinary society (N 178). Deleuzian control happens not only in spaces of confinement – prison, factory, school – and not only upon bodies, but through bodies, by channeling and inciting habits and expectations. Technologies and powers somehow collude to pacify dissent and instill in everyone an urge to see the suspicious in every space one threads. Such paranoiac militarization can be partially explained through racist biopower and as residual archaic desires for patriarchal and tribal authority. But a certain trivialization of security also allows citizens-consumers to enjoy life in a permanent state of emergency. The society of control is more than a culture of fear or a return to ancient territorializations, because it feeds off molecular processes particular to neurotic capitalism.

Combat Deleuze and Guattari write often about revolution and desire, especially in Anti-Oedipus. But a Stoic and even ascetic side to

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Deleuze can be found in his work of the late 1960s, especially Coldness and Cruelty and The Logic of Sense. He has a recurring fascination with the concepts of cruelty and self-discipline. Just like perfect mobility is not actual travel, perfect revolutionary violence and justice take place on a conceptual plane, not in physical spacetime. Deleuze’s political geography/philosophy is therefore not complete without his seldom-discussed ethics of violence. A good starting-point is the essay “To have done with judgment” (ECC ). Following Nietzsche, it decries the moralistic “doctrine of judgment” characterizing the Judeo-Greco-Christian-KantianRawlsian tradition. To judge is to base oneself upon a presupposed infinite debt of human existence towards the divine and the universal. Judging is always a question of distribution, bestowing relative moral worth onto acts, persons, entire countries. “At bottom, a doctrine of judgment presumes that the gods give lots to men, and that men, depending on their lots, are fit for some particular form, for some particular organic end” (ECC 128). Expanding on this, we can understand international opinion as a system of judgment central to the geopolitical order. Any judgment presupposes the possibility of “just war” and imposes strict spatial hierarchies. The Bush doctrine of the Axis of Evil is one of the most apposite examples in recent times. Against the governmentality of judgment, Deleuze posits a “system of cruelty,” which he derives from the surrealist playwright Antonin Artaud. Artaud (1994: 84ff) called his broadly Nietzschean approach to the stage “the theatre of cruelty” because it requires everyone involved (playwright, players, audience, etc.) to break with all theater as it has been hitherto and let the forces of life violently erupt. The theatre of cruelty is the opposite of the sadist torture and slow violence perpetrated in the name of religion and geopolitical stability. It constitutes an intense space in which the forces repressed by bourgeois culture can battle it out, but not in the way that psychoanalysis tries to tame and re-personalize them. Similarly for Deleuze, the system of cruelty encompasses the creation of a new kind of impersonal and gestural combat, “combat, combat everywhere; it is combat that replaces judgment” (ECC 132). We should not be too keen to stress Artaud’s amoralism. Conceived at the brink of World War II , the originality of his otherly justice lies less in its opposition to morality than in a commitment to simply transforming oneself and one’s audience

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without a predefined objective. What Deleuze sees in Artaud is the extremely difficult (and potentially fatal) attempt to rid thinking from all microfascism and preaching through the strictest selfdiscipline. Deleuze reminds us that Heraclitus said everything is war (ECC 133). This means, perhaps oddly, that the ideal of nonviolence is nihilistic: “whenever someone wants to make us renounce combat, what he is offering us is a ‘nothingness of the will’, a deification of the dream, a cult of death, even in its mildest form – that of the Buddha or Christ as a person (independently of what Saint Paul makes of him)” (ECC 133, quoting Nietzsche). Though violent and potentially heroic, the combat Deleuze–Nietzsche wants resists every personality cult (of Jesus or Buddha, for example), in fact personhood altogether, to fight only in the name of life. This is not a “combat against the Other” but a “combat between Oneself” (sic, 132). That is, the spatiality of such combat differs in kind from that of war. War destroys and mutilates, nominally for justice but actually to maximize territorial control. Its self-legitimation cannot hide its cynical and fascist tendencies (compare religion’s). What Deleuze calls the between-oneself is instead the deployment of a Nietzschean volition and the countercultural cultivation of virtue and independence: “more profoundly, it is the combatant himself who is the combat: the combat is between his own parts” (132). One brings genuine justice into existence only by being harsh on oneself, by willing impossible but necessary victory over the microfascist forces of the world-order, which one finds first of all within. It seems for Deleuze, then, wrestling with ethics precedes revolutionary struggle. Deleuze wants to valorize certain kinds of warfare, like guerrilla tactics. Such combat consists of bodies willing to take up arms by reorganizing themselves continuously, ridding themselves of race and nationality like T.E. Lawrence did in Arabia (or like Deleuze supposes he did). Deleuze also provides a framework to conceive the battleground itself. Again building on Nietzsche, a conflict is never a clash of two “sides” but of many heterogeneous forces (think of the ideological talk of “two sides” relating to Israel– Palestine or climate change). A true warrior leaves the dyadic situation of friends and enemies far behind. He or she despises any higher duty, especially towards country and religion, using violence only to defend the war-machine from its restriction by institutions.

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Combat is “the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming” (132). Only through becoming-animal, becoming-woman, and other becomings can a fighter like Lawrence become victorious. Combat ridicules the grandiose show of masculine strength epitomized in military parades and instead almost naively affirms the fragility of the molecular scale of life it fights for: “the baby is combat, and the small is an irreducible locus of forces, the most revealing test of forces” (133). But combat is never innocent or impetuous. One decides to fight: “A decision is not a judgment, nor is it the organic consequence of a judgment: it springs vitally from a whirlwind of forces that leads us into combat” (134). Further material for theorizing the space of combat is provided in The Logic of Sense, in which dying, the wound, and the battle are key sites in Deleuze’s reconstruction of the Stoic concept of event (see also the conclusion to Chapter 3). A battle is evental, that is, understandable in hindsight as having unexpectedly altered history, hence become an eternal truth. Crucially, the battle as event is ontologically separate from the skirmish of men, horses, and weapons in physical spacetime. It is impossible to exhaustively circumscribe what the Cuban Revolution or the Battle of Seattle are. Yet they happened, and they are still real. A battle “is” on two levels. On the actual and empirical level it is a “mixture of bodies,” but it is also something incorporeal or virtual, something “out there” in the real world that cannot be touched yet was named and is effectual as such. An event is a little like an Aristotelian essence or Platonic idea, except that it is singular (no revolution resembles another), irreducibly multiple (it isn’t exhausted by its name), and variable fully and simultaneously according to the perspective upon it (a revolution as understood by revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries). Deleuze thinks Stephen Crane’s 1895 proto-modernist novel about the US Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is “the most important book about the event.” He recalls that it describes how “an immense black and neutral cloud, or a noisy crow, hovers over the combatants and separates and disperses them only in order to render them even more indistinct” (LS 101). The nebulous and inhuman nature of the battle is what frames Deleuze’s understanding of the space of combat existing (or subsisting) on a different level

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from that of the combatants themselves. Crane’s story of a deserter who, ashamed of his cowardice, desires to be wounded (the red badge of courage) raises intensely individuating questions similar to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. If it appears we’re entering the realm of nationalist Hollywood clichés we should note that Crane uses the soldier’s affects as prism for the materialities and ambiguities of nineteenth-century warfare more generally. Deleuze insists on the “neutrality” of the battle. A battle belongs to no-one, it exceeds its every seizing. This is what makes it amenable to a return against the grain, a counteractualization. Furthermore, an event only becomes “eternal” because it was an unforeseeable outcome before. It was the creation of an absolutely new reality. If the battle is not an example of an event among others, but rather the Event in its essence, it is no doubt because it is actualized in diverse manners at once, and because each participant may grasp it at a different level of actualization within its variable present. [T]he battle hovers over its own field, being neutral in relation to all of its temporal actualizations, neutral and impassive in relation to the victor and the vanquished, the coward and the brave; because of this, it is all the more terrible. Never present but always yet to come and already passed, the battle is graspable only by the will of anonymity which it itself inspires. LS 100 Why would Deleuze call the battle the quintessential Event? For the same reasons he replaces judgment with combat and permanent war with the war-machine, to push what exists into what can become. Deleuze’s ethical and ontological commitments are almost indistinguishable. The battle is the site in which the Stoic affirmations of destiny and the sudden incarnation of the Time of eternity (Aion instead of Chronos) become possible. The battle-event par excellence, of course, is May 1968, which happened as The Logic of Sense was being completed, and which brought Gilles Deleuze to Félix Guattari. Any philosophy dedicated to revolution cannot shy away from affirming an ethical violence against or beneath the apparatuses of the actual. In his essay “The shame and the glory: T.E. Lawrence,” (in ECC ) revising the religious concept of glory, Deleuze sketches an ethics of

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guerrilla warfare, implicitly against Mao’s better-known theories. For Deleuze glory comes not from fulfilling army duties but from creative self-fashioning (here, Lawrence’s becoming-Arab, becomingdesert, even becoming-camel, in conjunction with the simultaneous becoming-organized of the Arab rebellion). Glory comes not even from victory. It emerges from “spiritual combat,” the commitment to working through what is “unliveable”: the shame of being a (homo)sexual body and a member of an empire and “a race.” One fights as one becomes, not for any higher principle. While orientalist and romantic tropes abound in the Lawrence of Arabia case it is necessary to understand how Deleuze’s Stoic leanings and reconceptualizations of combat should be paired with the far betterknown concept of war-machine, which could otherwise lack a sense of commitment. This detour through Artaud, Nietzsche, and Lawrence is required, therefore, to buttress the intimate connections between Deleuze and Guattari and revolutionary thought. They are increasingly discussed in activist circles, often via the more directly political work of Hardt and Negri (2004). But is Deleuze the philosopher for insurrection or civil war? We have seen his relationship to communism is tenuous, and his indebtedness to Nietzsche partially explains why he isn’t subsumable in autonomist and anarchist politics. Becoming-revolutionary is dedicated to warding off any identitarian or communitarian stability. Fighting the state must be ethical and ontological first, that is, invent a system of Stoic cruelty to oneself. Mindful of botched insurrections and the failures of red terrorism, Guattari and Deleuze constantly stress the ambiguities of violence and the so-called groupuscules. War-machines tend to become black holes, incarcerated, or even appropriated by the state or capital (see how Mao’s guerrilla warfare ends in Chinese capitalism). At the end of the day Deleuze doesn’t offer a solid ground for any political ideology or strategy, only for the opening of revolutionary possibility. To conclude, Deleuze’s political philosophy is a cartography of speeds, machines, and the cruel self-infliction of becoming on an ever-shifting battleground. Ontology itself becomes political in a manner social science rarely musters, content as it is to describe from an ostensible outside. Though close to Foucault, Deleuze’s take on the corporeality and spatiality of power is both ontological and evaluative, not “flat.” Which flows, which machines, which

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affects are good? Where do they turn unhealthy? Unlike Nietzsche, though, Deleuze understands that debt, exclusion, and repression are almost entirely to blame on the whirlwind of capital. To combat such monstrous power requires not just superhuman strength but the continuous plotting of multifarious struggle.

Scale Nongeographers usually do not see why the concept of scale might be important. Geometric scale is a fairly straightforward concept: extension comes in sizes, a centimeter stands for a kilometer; she is older than him. The difficulties arise when we try to ascertain what’s lost in scaling-down, what real detail maps leave out, how the longer engenders the shorter, and why we designate things big and small in the first place. When geographers or physicists say scale matters they mean an order of magnitude is irreducible because it has its own material organization, from quarks, crystals, and organs to households, mobs, regions, and planets. A state can declare war, a modern city cannot. A scale cannot be thought in isolation: a mob brings far-flung populations together and enforces regime change. Scale is a multiplicity of hierarchical “levels” but it isn’t easy to say which way the hierarchy goes. Interesting problems usually combine disparate scales: international law and the chemistry of e-waste, state racism and cosmology, crowdsourcing, finance, the Anthropocene. More than anyone, Deleuze provides an ontology adequate to this scalar nature of reality.

Flat Science cannot do without at least an implicit concept of scale. Size profoundly matters in the way processes unfold temporally and spatially, as do scope and perspective. This is a basic acknowledgment in mapping and Geographic Information Science (GIScience). Thinking about scale also directly impinges on debates around anthropocentrism. The revolutions in thought fostered by Copernicus, van Leeuwenhoek, Cuvier, Pasteur, and Planck caused profound disturbances in the European presumptions of scale: each time the scale of the human became more fragile and a new problem for

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thought (Leibniz and the microscope, Pascal and the telescope). But is scale part of the structure of physical spacetime, or a handy heuristic? If processes of whatever level or kind repeat profound morphological similarities, scale is obviously but a convenient illusion. But if one kind of process and corresponding inquiry is irreducible to others, yet necessarily interpenetrates with them, some kind of realist concept of scale remains important. The concept of system from thermodynamics in the nineteenth century to cybernetics in the twentieth leveled notions of scale. The enthusiasm for the discovery of mathematical analogies across “levels” after complexity theory clearly undermines anthropocentrism (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Sometimes this leads to the suggestion that human society is better managed as biophysical processes. Through advances in agent-based modeling simple mathematical functors like power-laws and fractals are increasingly discovered to shape traffic, urban sprawl, hurricanes, cocktail parties, river deltas, and of course social media and commodity markets. The World-Wide-Web is the quintessential example here: zoom in or out, you supposedly see the same topological organization. What results is the notion and hope of a scale-free physics, and concomitantly the resurfacing of the utopian Enlightenment idea of a social physics through which global capitalism can be more rationally engineered. We saw in Chapter 1 that Deleuze abandons classical categories of transcendence (God, truth, essence, Being) and revises the Kantian immanent grounding of thought. There is no higher reality over and above this world, no ultimate dialectical teleology beneath it. Manuel DeLanda (2002: 37) argues that Deleuzian immanence amounts to a “flat ontology” and a realism in which all physical processes are considered at the same level. Complexity theory gives DeLanda the opportunity to lay out a framework for analyzing spacetime. What he calls assemblage theory attempts to rid social science of the anthropocentrism and many scalar binaries that have plagued it, like individual/society, society/nature, local/global, and micro/macro. Everything happens at the meso-level. This does not mean that scale does not exist for DeLanda’s Deleuze but that the ontology of the physical sciences can usurp the post-Kantian critical legacy. The question becomes how complexity theory deals with the stratification and territorialization through capital that we have seen are central to Deleuze and Guattari.

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A well-known debate about scale in human geography is required reading here. Enthusiastic about the implications of flat ontology for the discipline, some Deleuze-inflected geographers argue that flows, networks, and emergence put an end to the scale concept (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005). They find that the nested hierarchy (concentric or Russian-doll) approach to scale still manages to dominate geography. Ultimately scale appears itself as a transcendent category, with all levels stacking up neatly towards a God’s-eye view overseeing them all at once from above. To understand assemblages properly is incompatible with presuming a verticality of levels beforehand. One’s perspective emerges amidst and along with the studied flows and events themselves. Far more political than DeLanda (or Bruno Latour), these geographers argue flat ontology emancipates critical geography from the strictures of hegemonic transcendent thinking. Space consists of milieus and potentialities that coagulate into temporarily stable “sites” but these sites are not organized according to scale. Now, scale has been crucial to critical-geographical understandings of how regional variation, including the differentiations of core and peripheries, state institutions, urbanization, environmental change, and the laboring and consuming body act as conduits for power and capital flow (Smith 2008: chapter 5). To flatten out the difference in the capacities and spatial scope between a neighborhood committee and a multinational corporation seems to run against the concept of power itself. In response to the call for scalelessness, the epistemological and political importance of a revised scalar perspective was strongly defended (Leitner and Willem 2007). While flow and contingency do indeed upset the taken-for-granted concentric approach to scale this doesn’t mean there is no complex layeredness to spatial processes. In particular, there is definitely no reason to reify the scale of the state before the other territorializations occurring around it. Most processes are multi-scalar, and if a particular scalar hierarchy transpires it is entirely contingent on the flows constituting it. Scale is real, that is, constructed. Causality goes up, down, and sideways. If flat ontology wants to abolish scale it is not only empirically absurd, this countercritique says, but incapable of political strategizing. Deleuze and Guattari never deny scale. The analogy and similitude across scales that flat ontology, network enthusiasts, and some complexity theorists purport to discover are exactly what

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blind us to the differences that systems make. It is crucial to distinguish actual spacetime, which consists of flows ordered into vertical strata and horizontal territories, and the virtual abstract machines, diagrams, or topological structures that are the formal reason for those orderings. On the plane of consistency where all diagrams converge, there is indeed no scale or order, no distinction between human and nonhuman, only pure differentiation. This is made quite clear in the geology plateau: The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the distinction between contents and expressions, or that between forms and formed substances; these things exist only by means of and in relation to the strata. [T]he strata are spin-offs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always primary and always immanent. ATP 69–70 At the plane of consistency it does not make sense to talk about scale or quantity, as its “dimensions” are purely “formal,” that is, real but not physical. The virtual is triggered by an absolute deterritorialization that cannot be represented. Far from chaotic, it gains its consistency – a “distribution” of intensities, thresholds, conjunctions and so on – by extracting a certain functionality from bodies, assemblages, strata, and phyla. “The plane of consistency is thus what enables all the various strata of [the] socius, of technology and so on to be cut across, invested, disinvested and transferred,” as Guattari put it earlier (MR 128). Or, without the rigid organization of strata, there would be nothing to deterritorialize. Hence flat ontology confuses virtual and actual, then concludes there are no magnitudes, orders, or thickenings. Deleuze and Guattari admittedly sometimes make the confusion easy. “An assemblage has neither base nor superstructure, neither deep structure nor superficial structure; it flattens all of its dimensions onto a single plane of consistency upon which reciprocal presuppositions and mutual insertions play themselves out” (ATP 90). Would it not be more accurate to say an abstract machine is “flat,” not an assemblage? Assemblages are necessarily stratified, hence scalar. An assemblage opens on one side to the plane of

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consistency but, on the other, to territories and structures that are inescapably hierarchical and vectorial. We have seen in the last two chapters how social formations are replete with layers and movements at varying speeds. Assemblages have to be mapped bottom-up, that is, by considering the amalgamations of the flows that pass through and constitute them. But component flows are also triggered and constrained by assemblages, something complexity theory calls downward causation. Now, what direction are “bottom-up” and “downward”? We must presume an assemblage is bigger than its parts and more localized than its flows. The most deterritorialized vector of a mode of production (earth for savages, king’s body for despotism, capital for capitalism) is really wider and more infrastructural than other flows in the socius or it would be senseless to isolate it. To conclude, scale is an integral part of the fabric of spacetime precisely thanks to the scalelessness or absolute deterritorialization of its plane of consistency. Because scale, like place, space, and time, is usually conceived in essentialist ways, it is indispensable to rethink it. Flattening the real differences between physical, human, technological, and biological strata repeats the technocapitalist fantasies of logical positivism and cybernetics. Network and information have become utopian fetishes. While Guattari understood the considerable benefits of complexity theory and computer modeling for building an immanentist ontology, the point was to subvert the technosocial system it was mapping. Keen on exposing social and environmental destruction, he might have pointed out that only by ignoring the geographies of mining, energy, e-waste, drug trafficking, and sex work can the molecular freedom of movement of the internet be trumpeted as much as it is. Stratoanalysis shows everything is stratified, hence scalarized. Only the plane of consistency is without scalar hierarchy. Finally, flattening knowledge domains removes the impetus to evaluate. Nietzsche despised the democratic desire for horizontality. Rank had to be reinvented from scratch against slave mentality. Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary politics is less aristocratic but has nothing to do with postmodern relativism. Ontological investigation always evaluates its object: is it good or bad? Ultimately, scalarity is necessary for mapping the terrain on which social struggle is to take place.

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Molecular Against the background of a tendency in some Deleuzians to jettison scalar difference we will end this chapter on flows by showing how a key conceptual couple Guattari introduced allows him and Deleuze to understand the hierarchical organization of space without succumbing to analogy, reductionism, or Russian-doll concentricity. Over the 1960s, Guattari remembered the molar/ molecular distinction from his chemistry classes while a pharmacology student. He borrowed it to make his clinical practice not just innovative in institutional terms, but directly revolutionary. The micropolitical question – that is, the analysis of formations of desire in the social field – has to do with the way in which the level of broader social differences (which I call “molar”) intersect with the level that I call “molecular”. Between these two levels there is no distinctive opposition that depends on a logical principle of contradiction. It may seem difficult, but it is merely necessary to change the logic. In quantum physics, for example, it was necessary for physicists to admit that matter is corpuscular and undulatory at the same time. In the same way – social struggles are molar and molecular at the same time. MRB 179 What Guattari terms “levels” here is what supplements the geographical concept of scale. Unlike with scale, there are only two “levels” here, molar and molecular. The levels are necessarily scalar to some degree, but only from the point of view of the molar. The “broader social differences” constituting social formations will be further extended, longer-lasting, and more structured – in a word larger – than the “formations of desire” that come and go rapidly and locally and are impossible to map. Strictly speaking, the “micro”-level of desire cannot be associated with one scale or another. Molecular and molar are therefore both hierarchical and coextensive. Everything has two faces, a molar face and a molecular face. The distinction is primarily not of magnitude but of mode of spatial composition. Molar aggregates have an all-encompassing morphogenesis: the “structures,” “formations,” “relations,” and so on of which Marxism and psychoanalysis talk, the stable aggregates people identify with. Molecular processes are supple, fluid,

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rhizomatic, fleeting, with only local linkages, like an ideal outdoors summer rave. From the molecular viewpoint, all bodies have idiosyncrasies that are suppressed to obtain molar categories. The same system simultaneously exhibits molar tendencies towards order and identity and molecular tendencies towards differentiation and recomposition. Populations are molar from the perspective of statistics and marketing, but conceiving populations only in this way has to forcefully bracket the mass of motley practices that do not fit into the census boxes and keep making new connections amongst themselves. Similarly, war and world-order are molar processes insofar as they answer to the strategies of a militaryindustrial-entertainment-complex but simultaneously depend on fear, delusion, thrill-seeking, nostalgia, and other inchoate affects that could well turn against the complex. Even if their barrage of conceptual pairs makes it seem that they are after some foundational duality, Deleuze and Guattari repeat again and again that molecular and molar do not form an opposition or a dialectic. Social field and desire are radically asymmetrical, and desire comes first. The molar is constructed from the molecular, literally enveloping it, and cannot exist without it. The molecular is autonomous and constitutes itself even when it is in response to and in order to escape the molar. The aggregation or scaling-up of molecular processes – growth, maintenance, segmentation – cannot avoid molecular processes leaking from it. Scale is therefore an effect of a more profound asymmetrical choreography of two radically different modalities of space. In the Russian-doll scalar imaginary there is complete analogy, the small just a smaller big and the big just a bigger small. In the more reductionist versions of complexity theory there is also analogy, with all systems reduced to power-laws. In critical geography, instead, scalar hierarchy and isomorphy are entirely contingent on the mechanisms of the social machine, especially the capitalist state. For Deleuze and Guattari the scale of states, segregation, and the world-order have to subjugate the flows of bodies, signs, and commodities of which they are physically composed. And the molar/molecular distinction is not only spatial but also logical. Wherever there is purposefulness, clarity, or the supposition of a whole, for example, there is molar logic at work. The agrarian despotic state and monotheistic religion excel in molar partitioning,

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creating stability by segmenting populations into castes legally, topologically, and in physical space. It was clear from the Guattari quote that the molar/molecular distinction is strongly political. The notion of class antagonism has to concede, as Lenin and Mao implicitly do, that there is an anonymous, undisciplined, excessive aggregate of bodies not identifiable with the schema of classes. The political concept of the masses (vulgus, plebs, multitude) is in fact older than the sociological concept of “class.” Deleuze and Guattari think it is also ontologically prior: social classes themselves imply “masses” that do not have the same kind of movement, distribution, or objectives and do not wage the same kind of struggle. Attempts to distinguish mass from class effectively tend towards this limit: the notion of mass is a molecular notion operating according to a type of segmentation irreducible to the molar segmentarity of class. Yet classes are indeed fashioned from masses; they crystallize them. And masses are constantly flowing or leaking from classes. ATP 213 Class consciousness does not suffice for revolution, though it is an important step. “At the ‘microscopic’ level, what must happen, first of all, is a kind of direct changeover to communism, the abolition of bourgeois power in the sense that that power is embodied in the bureaucrat, the leader or the militant dedicated revolutionary” (MR 63). What Guattari calls molecular revolution can be fruitfully combined with what Deleuze called combat in the previous section, the escape from identity at every “level” such as what Lawrence did in the Arab rebellion. Such self-transforming revolution derives its force from the deadlocks of the traditional left and affirms that communism is already happening. “Politics on the grand scale can never administer its molar segments without also dealing with the micro-injections or infiltrations that work in its favor or present an obstacle to it; indeed, the larger the molar aggregates, the greater the molecularization of the agencies they put into play” (ATP 204). If molar/molecular is not a bipolarity, the second crucial point is that molecularization is not always good. The mode of composition of capital is eminently molecular, deterritorializing ever more chunks of the earth and beyond. Psychosis is another instance, one

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where the molarity of codes breaks down (hence the affinity of capitalism and schizophrenia). We also saw how fascism and war operate molecularly insofar as they mobilize desire. “Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination” (ATP 215). Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari are willing to take the risk of molecular revolution. Describing the possible molecular is intrinsically prescriptive. It was the molecular nature of May 1968 that brought them together in the first place. “May 1968 in France was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from the viewpoint of macropolitics” (ATP 216). But the quick dissipation of revolution in 1968 also showed dismantling capitalism will neither happen spontaneously nor through orthodox Leninism. Political struggle requires both “subversion of every form of power, at every level” and “a degree of centralism” (MR 62). Molecular revolution eschews large-scale millenarian and teleological visions. But Guattari also reminds his audience, as when he analyzes the relationship of then-union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with radical movements in Molecular Revolution in Brazil (e.g. MRB 30), that local radical projects have to address the scale of the state. There has to be some coordination, with a minimum of organizational hierarchy, so that the war-machines combating subterraneously on many terrains at once can resonate and gain a widening effect. The molecularization of struggle means making of scale a guerrilla tactic. Deleuze and Guattari are both celebrated and criticized for presenting the world as an immense mass of amorphous flows. This chapter has shown flux is indeed at the basis of how they approach society: population, capitalism, and war are fundamentally defined by deterritorialization. But this mobility always and everywhere invites re-territorialization into social disparities at a number of interpenetrating scales. Or, flows usually end up in places.

CHAPTER THREE

Places Place has been an essential concept in geography, architecture, and planning, but also literary criticism and mathematics. As a metaphysical idea it dates back at least to Aristotle. In the 1970s, humanistic geography, spearheaded by Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), critiqued the mathematical view of space associated with what was then called spatial science and has in the meantime morphed into various computer-aided disciplines like GIS , agent-based modeling, geovisualization, and so on. Drawing from phenomenology, Tuan conceives “space” as the realm of abstraction and reduction as Newton conceived it, but also movement and freedom, while “place” is the realm of lived experience and meaning. Even if this framework subsequently came under attack within geography by way of Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism, the valuation of place above space remains a strong tendency across many discourses. The previous chapters have shown that Deleuze and Guattari agree with critical geographers against humanism that movement and difference come before and hence constitute place and identity. But they also argue strongly against the fantasy of making all space knowable, measurable, and flat, a fantasy fundamental to Integrated World Capitalism in the age of Google. The singularity of place is never determined by the causalities and abstractions of space. Spatial unevenness goes all the way down and up, below and above what Google Earth can capture. The concepts of smooth and striated space and territorialization are some of the most sophisticated available to both counter capitalism’s ideology of boundlessness and rethink the eventfulness of place as redolent with surprise. 105

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There is a much prejudice about Deleuze and Guattari, to the effect that they are intoxicated by fluidity and have little to offer in understanding the construction of boundaries and power. After mapping the flows of population, war, and capital, we will continue seeing how wrong this prejudice is. After Deleuze’s contribution to ontology it is possible to understand that without some stability of spatial arrangements, without engaging physical position and topological place in the socius, there could be no concept of social formation as such and none of the global flows discussed so far. Everything depends on building an idea of the interplay of de- and reterritorialization, which, in a more explicitly spatial idiom, Deleuze and Guattari call smooth and striated space. This chapter focuses on the making of place at two scales, that of cities and of bodies, but these already open out to others like regions, states, landscapes, and the technosphere. It will end by turning to Deleuze’s central concept of event, arguably the most accomplished ontology of how space becomes place.

Territories In Chapter 2 we saw how deterritorialization, one of Deleuze and Guattari’s best known concepts, is essential to their understanding of capitalism. Like Marx, they emphasize the fact that capital constantly overcomes the barriers it encounters. This does not mean, as postmodernist cliché would have it, that places and borders do not exist, but that they are secondary to the more fundamental flows of finance, commodities, and populations. If de- and reterritorialization are Deleuze and Guattari’s terms for the construction and undoing of local spatial configurations, “territory” is their generic term for what geographers and others have called place. It is no coincidence that Guattari picked exactly this term in the 1960s from zoology and geopolitics, as he wanted to alert us to the warlike dimension every identitarian process consists of. Hence, like “place” can in the largest sense refer to any bit of humanoid spatiality from bodily organs, discursive positionalities, and dream components to streets, continents, and spaceships, territorialization in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a concept for examining material dynamics at any scale.

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Striation The last plateau of A Thousand Plateaus before the conclusion is a summary of the Deleuzian theory of multiplicity, movement, and power and also Deleuze’s most explicit statement on space as such. The plateau is dated 1440, the year of the first important nautical chart devised by Portuguese navigators, an event inaugurating an era in which Europeans obtained resources and labor directly from Africa. Further advances in navigation led to Columbus’s voyage to the Caribbean in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s to India in 1498. Deleuze and Guattari understand very well why these feats of “discovery” are such obsessive retrospective themes. Echoing Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean they call the open sea the “smooth space par excellence” (ATP 387, 479). Oceanic limitlessness and connectivity allowed European expansion but only via the striations of cartography, fervent nationalism, religious chauvinism, and maritime law, imposed unilaterally with cannon. It is not that there was no navigation before Portuguese charts but they perfected an ocularcentric approach to the seas as opposed to the tactile and cosmic systems sailors used before (most impressively the Polynesian). These charts foregrounded “a dimensionality that subordinated directionality, or superimposed itself upon it, became increasingly entrenched” (ATP 480). No real space is perfectly smooth or perfectly striated. Smooth space allows for and tends to become traversed by striation, while striation enables new kinds of smoothness. They are only distinguishable on the conceptual plane. Even the ultimate smoothness of intergalactic void is only accessible through mathematics and expensive telescopes. The distinction smooth/striated seems to originate with Pierre Boulez, one of Deleuze’s favorite composers (ATP 477). Boulez introduces it to talk about how musical time has both regularities like notes, meter, scale, volume, tempi, and accents, which he calls striated time, and relatively immeasurable qualities like variation, microtones, timbre, density, dissonance, and swing, which he calls smooth time. For Deleuze this interplay of quantity and intensity structures space as much as it does time or perhaps even more so. To put it in the terms of Chapter 2, smooth space is exemplified in the nomadic space of war-machines; striated space is exemplified in the sedentary space of the state. The rich quasi-onomatopoeic connotations of motility in the French word for “smooth,” glisse

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(glisser = to slip, skate, slither, skitter), are unfortunately lost in translation. Conversely, striae are ridges or marks in a field or in skin (like stretch marks) directly invoking irrigation (Latin stria, furrow). Striation therefore fundamentally suggests human movement in relation to the earth and the alteration of bodies. So on the etymological level the activity of striation is purposefully and superimposed from without, while smoothness or smoothing (glissement) is activity that extraneous structures cannot get a grip on. Like territoriality, striation is at basis a political or geo-political concept. Board games provide an example. For Deleuze and Guattari, chess is the king of striation in games, “an institutionalized, regulated, coded war” with strictly predetermined moves and strategies. The board of go, on the other hand, has no such narrative and hierarchical structure. With its extremely simple rules, a game of go grows and collapses unpredictably in any direction. “In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (ATP 353). While computers have long since beaten humans in chess, the immense combinatorial complexity of go means that artificial intelligence only recently managed to emulate its intuitive smoothness. The smooth/striated plateau in A Thousand Plateaus presents several more “models” of the two kinds of space that amount to a kind of methodology as well as politics. First, textiles. Weaving can only be done in an extremely structured way. A perfect interplay of warp and woof is necessary to interlace thread. In an entirely material sense weaving is coterminous with agricultural civilization and early industrialization: irrigation, husbandry, patriarchy, domesticity, taxation. In contrast, felt is what Deleuze and Guattari call an “antifabric” and used mostly by nomads. (They don’t mention fur and leather.) Felt is not interwoven but matted by heating and smoothing a preexisting entanglement of microfibers. It is smooth but not homogeneous, consisting rather of continuous variations in all directions. Felt has no horizontal and vertical, only a limitless middle. There are of course textiles that combine the smooth and the striated. The relatively smooth space of patchwork (of for example the Lambadi nomads from Northern India) comes from recycling and recombining singular pieces of striated matter like

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fabric, mirrors, and various metals. As opposed to the nostalgic kitsch of embroidery, Deleuze and Guattari point out that patchwork and quilt are rhythmical, topological, and even crazy. Second, music. Inspired by contemporary composers, Deleuze understands the aesthetic force of music to consist in microtonality, texture, rhythm, and other tendencies one cannot represent within a traditional score. Musique concrète and free jazz are obvious examples of music giving predominance to smooth space and smooth time. Third, navigation. Smooth space is defined by the subordination of points or stops to vectors while the opposite is the case for striated space. Striated space corresponds to the spatial imagination of Mercator and Descartes: metric, static, allencompassing, and with a hidden Eurocentric ideology. Striated space is sensed from afar by the eye. In contrast, when space is apprehended by touch, smell, sound, balance, and the guts, it becomes intensive and voluminous. Smooth space is definitely organized but in a dynamic non-Euclidian way, based on its physicality and not on flat formal coordinates imposed on it from outside. Navigating a mass demonstration or a crowded swimming pool provides a good example: a map would be quite useless. As we have seen before, psychedelic tripping and vagabondage are not necessarily good models for nomadology, and Cartesian mapping is used for many other ends than conquest and oppression. The striations of capitalism by way of its commodification, quantification, and exploitation thrive on smooth spaces of tourism and an itinerant lumpenproletariat. Deleuze and Guattari call for smoothness in the way space is approached conceptually and not necessarily for a dismantling of real Cartesian epistemology. Thinking like a nomad is a “voyaging in place,” a “mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space” (ATP 482). Such intensive instead of extensive travel is a difficult and uncertain process that has to remain invisible and incomprehensible for the capitalist state. (We return to intensity in the final chapter.) Like actual nomads, smooth spaces are a matter of enduring even to the point of death. War-machines are not simply about mobility or sensuousness but “holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave, that they leave only in order to conquer and die” (ATP 482). Fourth, mathematics. At the purely formal level the smooth/ striated distinction brings Deleuze to his favorite mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, to whom he argues we owe the modern concept

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concept of multiplicity which Chapter 2 started with. Holding any number of dimensions, open to transformations impossible in our familiar three dimensions, the Riemannian manifold (multiplicité) allows for a topology, the study of places (topoi) and neighborhoods. Riemann’s invention of transcendental spatialities of n dimensions became central to physics. Topology formalizes the behavior of such objects as surfaces, folds, envelopes, knots – like the Borromean rings and Moebius strip dear to Lacan – and, most famously in the internet age, networks. Such objects are coterminous with their spaces and their tensions and distances are unique to them. Building on Bergson’s critique of quantitative or extensive difference in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze emphasizes this uniqueness or singularity of manifolds. He redefines a manifold as a space that cannot be divided without changing its nature. A manifold is in continuous variation with itself without being held together by external coordinates and cannot strictly speaking be compared with or added to another. In sharp contrast, a Euclidian space can be chopped, moved, zoomed, merged, or stretched at will, but it remains a subset of Euclidian space. We will see in the next section why Deleuze calls Euclidian geometry the preeminent royal or majoritarian science. Instead, topology affirms the malleability of seemingly familiar space. What should be remembered is that for mathematics the familiar three-dimensional isomorphic spaces of Euclid and Newton are not opposed to, but very peculiar instances of, an infinitely larger set of possible topologies. After Deleuze, topology can be politicized by pushing it to discover and uncover how ways of knowing are anchored in common-sense Euclidian presuppositions. Deleuze and Guattari are also intrigued with the geometry of fractals, which have now become another pop-science and psychedelic cliché. Whether physical or mathematical, a fractal is a complex pattern made by an infinitely repeated feedback loop that (because of the repetition going “up” and “down”) has no overall scale. A Von Koch curve is neither a line nor a region but has log 4/ log 3 (1.261859 . . .) dimensions. Deleuze and Guattari also mention the Sierpensky sponge (ATP 487). Fractals and their attendant power laws are claimed to structure everything from snowflakes, lightning, and tree branches to sea shells, neurons, river and mountain systems, broccoli, clouds, and of course capitalist markets. Most such phenomena were for centuries almost unthinkable.

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Deleuze and Guattari can now add that smooth spaces are fractal and spongey, that is, nonmetric yet recursive and directional. They would urge some caution, however, in making fractality an explanatory tool for reducing all processes to the same mathematical behavior. The fifth model for conceiving the smooth and the striated comes from physics. From Mediterranean antiquity to Newton, physics has sought to centralize, linearize, and homogenize fields that are in themselves heterogeneous and centrifugal. Deleuze and Guattari note that this is exactly what the state and the city have always aimed to do with the social field as such (ATP 489). But physics has also always come up against the limitations of its striated approach. The clinamen or primordial “swerve” that ancient materialism posited can serve to remind us that physics has always been aware that phenomena are not reducible to the prior striated formulas and frameworks (LS 269). With thermodynamics and chaos theory, and building on topology, transdisciplinary systems theory has been catching up with the reality of smooth space, even if reductionist positivism on one side and mystical vitalism on the other remain traps. It is fundamental to the epistemology of the smooth and striated that the archaic nullification of the smooth that is constitutive of mechanical knowing reappears in the institutional technologies of the army, stockpiling, public work, wage-labor, and the economic and legal construction of “standard-man.” Human work expends energy with a purpose in mind. All state apparatuses presuppose this utilitarian concept of work by human and nonhuman bodies, which in turn presupposes striated spacetime. However, in capitalism there is an increasing deterritorialization of both work and its product (value) through general mechanization. What Guattari calls Integrated World Capitalism is nothing but the production of one smooth planetary space by pushing the ancient sociophysics of labor beyond its locatability in the public works of one empire. We have already seen why under neoliberal capitalism almost everything creates value, whether sending text messages, giving birth, or becoming a pensioner: “capitalism operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling – every semiotic system” (ATP 492). With humanity now enslaved to smoothness as its

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destiny, revolutionary politics obviously cannot simply defend smooth against striated. The last model is art history. Deleuze and Guattari discuss various patterns or “lines,” distinguishing nomad art from the architecture and imagery of Egypt, China, and other empires. If imperial art is rectilinear and optical, nomad art as well as prehistoric and children’s art and modern art are haptic and immersive, pulling the viewer into earth, sky, and movement (Cézanne) instead of presenting a harmoniously ordered and recognizable scene the viewer appreciates from afar (perspectivism, the Acropolis). Nomad art conjures a smooth space without fore- and background, without horizon and even frame (ATP 493). Deleuze and Guattari say the “Gothic line” is an example of nomad art insinuating itself within sedentary civilization (ATP 415). They are therefore not arguing for a primitivism that appropriates indigenous aesthetics as if it would be more authentic, but for the disruptive force of abstraction that can allow fully modern art to rethink its relation to space and time by creatively reshaping its nomadic strata. Two things should be stressed. First, there is a resonance, not homology or analogy, across models. What Guattari would call the transversal convergences of smoothness and of striation across wildly different domains is not exactly objective but a function of how the spatial organization of these domains are conceived. Understood metaphysically, Riemannian manifolds are not like but the same as patchwork, oceans, free jazz, and teleshopping. Smoothness exists as an abstract machine in the real world, whether it is noticed or not. In its incarnation into reality, striation is bound to piggyback on the nomadism and pliability of smoothness. As the examples of maritime colonialism and labor under capitalism remind us, smoothness harbors incipient striation. Second, plateau 14 can easily be read as a naturalization of anarchism. But smooth is not simply good and striated bad. Following Virilio and Marx, A Thousand Plateaus often makes the observation that there can be no power without continuous movement. “One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space” (ATP 386). U.S. cities are an apex of the striation of Descartes but also immediately open out to the smooth spaces of financial districts and of hippies escaping suburbs. With satellite-linked online markets

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and fantasies like Reagan’s Star Wars program, smooth space today mostly undergirds oppression and inequality. This is an ontological paradox but also an ethical imperative. The smooth/striated plateau ends with caution: “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (ATP 500). If it is true that Deleuze and Guattari throughout their work defend the smooth against the striated, this is to counter the philosophical laziness of the hegemonic Western approaches to space as orthogonal and homogenous. Real space is “holey” in that its striations always harbor gaps through which escape becomes possible (ATP 413–15). In order to liberate space, nomadology asks us to analyze the passage between the two spatialities. This procedure cannot but require imposing and inhabiting a minimum of structure. A blanket condemnation of quantity, plans, or vision would fall in the same trap as the obsessive effort at discouraging fluidity.

Refrains Striation is not simply the construction of places in the geographical sense but the physical and ideological framework by which place construction becomes possible. It is specific not to the human species but to stratified society. Territorialization, meanwhile, is a more general term and refers to any activities whereby an animal makes boundaries. We can call “place” the specifically human kind of territoriality, but there are important qualifications. First, human territoriality repeats some animal territoriality through its phylogenetic line. Second, territories preexist the species that inhabit them yet are not simply programmed within its genome. Territories derive from the interplay of bodies with their environments, flows of matter and energy, deeper bio- and geophysical phyla, even the cosmos itself (think of how albatrosses are drawn into an interhemispheric territoriality). Third, and perhaps most original in Deleuze and Guattari’s rethinking of territory, boundaries are themselves assemblages. Territorialization requires a dynamic coming-together of heterogeneous components set loose from elsewhere. Something is deterritorialized only to be reterritorialized within a new configuration. Following the theorization of difference and individuation in Difference and Repetition most Deleuzians avoid calling this dynamism a “dialectic” between movement and

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stasis, or wave and particle, or becoming and being, because there is no higher identity that would hold the two “sides” or “poles” in mutually negating opposition. The consistency of a territory – a major concept in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? – is not a higher identity but a specific “way of holding together” in which all components play an active and complementary role, a local mannerism of reality, a symphony. What makes an assemblage like a territory hold together are its lines of flight, not its essence or structure (ATP 327–28). Deleuze and Guattari largely favor deterritorialization because it is the more basic and repressed principle. But a refrain in this book has been that it would be wrong to see deterritorialization as a straightforward ethical or epistemological objective because its creative momentum intrinsically lends itself to the return of essence and transcendence. The refrains plateau develops this dynamic sense of territory and suggests that the place-making fundamental to human life is a local expression of a deeper and older process shared with mammals, birds, and insects. The plateau’s main target is not only phenomenology and existentialism, which define human place as fundamentally different from animal and plant territorialities, but the hegemonic obsessions with fitness and adaptation that usually inform the territory concept. While for biologists like Karl Lorenz birdsong is explained by its function to erect boundaries and advertise masculinity, for Deleuze and Guattari it is first and foremost an aesthetic process produced as part – the most deterritorialized part – of an assemblage or desiring-machine (ATP 315). Birdsong is not like music, it is music. For neo-Darwinian dogma, in a thinly veiled extrapolation from the real-world striations of markets and sovereignty, the territorialities of sex and habitat in animals are predictable phenotypical extensions of a species’ DNA . Instead, for Deleuze and Guattari, a territory only emerges contingently from the gestures and signs (urine, song, dance) in and around it. “The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the mark that makes the territory. Functions in a territory are not primary; they presuppose a territoryproducing expressiveness. In this sense, the territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of territorialization” (ATP 315). A territory has to be continuously maintained by repeating those marks and is therefore porous, unstable, and contested. Repeated trillions of times over millions of years it

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only appears to the reductionist biologist that a species-specific territoriality is an inescapable instinctual imperative. Deleuze and Guattari are especially critical of the tendency in mainstream biology to see aggression and functionality everywhere in life (one remembers Lorenz’s one-time sympathies for Nazi eugenics). Without denying the role of birdsong in aggression and mating ritual, even a child can appreciate that birds sing as groups and not simply to enhance competition between individuals. What compels them to sing is not some transcendent struggle for survival but diurnality, seasonality, curiosity, expression for expression’s sake. The lyre bird’s famous mimesis of forest and urban soundscapes (find it on YouTube) is but a particularly astonishing example of the more general creativity, or musicality, of all animal soundscapes. Birdsong is probably the best example of what Deleuze and Guattari call the refrain (the French ritournelle is more musicological but also means “chorus” and “jingle”). A refrain is a repetitive sonic process whereby an animal territory is established. In a larger sense, any repeated sequence of signs can be called refrain insofar as it sustains a territory (a refrain of typing makes an office, a refrain of gestures makes a conveyor belt). The refrain plateau begins with a little boy walking in the dark and comforting himself by singing. “The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos” (ATP 311). Breathing and moving, the boy makes a comfort zone around himself only by drawing comfort from and projecting it back into the scary milieu gliding by, which threatens to engulf him the instant he stops singing. His voice relates to his skipping as a cadence. He gathers “sonic bricks” to make walls against the forces of evil, just like a military camp requires a trumpet, a church a choir, and a housewife a radio. Bus passengers require an iPod or smartphone to shield themselves from each other. Car stereos emit menacing sounds to the neighborhood. Every home and every homeward movement requires a repetitive soundscape. A glitch in the repetition is catastrophic, as chaos (“the milieu of all milieus”) comes gushing in. A sound has volume, a four-dimensional envelope and intensity embracing its emitter and providing it two centripetal functions, orientation and protection, and one centrifugal, improvisation. A sound also has rhythm, a particular spatialization of time that pulls heterogeneous components together. Importantly, the home-drawing

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activity itself creates the possibility of launching into a new region, to the earth or the future. This repetitive and improvised emission of sounds is what Deleuze and Guattari call the refrain. A refrain is a “prism, a crystal of space-time” (ATP 348) acting on its milieu so as to select and extract various components to constitute a territory. Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari exaggerate the role of sonic signs in territoriality: obviously homes are assembled with actions, smells, memories, and non-semiotic objects too. It seems they do this to be able to forefront the ontological problem of consistency, “the manner in which the components of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of passage and relay” (ATP 327). The auditory sense is evanescent, locally shared and directly felt, hence often “the most deterritorialized vector” of an animal assemblage. By focusing the discussion of territoriality on soundscape, Deleuze and Guattari want to call attention to just how contingent on repetition every territory is. Against the essentialist conceptions of place fundamental to all conservative thought – Malthusianism, social Darwinism, the Countryside Alliance in England, Hindutva in India – the assemblage approach insists that any place is already being reassembled and harboring new relations to the rest of space in order to exist at all. “The territorial assemblage is inseparable from lines or coefficients of deterritorialization, passages, and relays toward other assemblages” (ATP 333). The central ontological argument in the refrain plateau is, then, that a place is entirely dependent on its components. These components are not only heterogeneous and fluid but constantly being replaced. A Thousand Plateaus frequently uses the concept of relay. Interestingly the French verb relayer originally referred to the mobilization of a fresh pack of hounds for the deer hunt. A territory like a king’s forest is a machinic assemblage combining men, animals, trees, trumpet, title deeds, and taxes, which need to move through, about, and within the assemblage so as to literally stitch it together. The refrain is activated through its milieu, that is, through flows of matter and energy into and out of the organisms producing the refrain (milieu in French means both “environment” and “between”). Milieus are more than environments in the usual sense, since they pass through and inhabit bodies as much as they surround them.

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Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources ad actions-perceptions. ATP 313 It is by “vibrating” the substances and energies in these four kinds of milieu through a refrain that an organism creates a territory. “A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to intrusions). It is built from aspects or portions of milieus” (ATP 314). Territories are the becoming-expressive of rhythms immanent to milieus before they acquire functions for organizing the competition for space and resources. A territory is a kind of art, art brut. It consists of readymades, which an organism finds and cannot but sing and dance along with (ATP 316). The concept of refrain is extremely useful for studying the aural components of patriarchy, religion, the state, and nationalism, the most powerful territorializing forces in society. Through its milieu vibrations, a refrain “always carries the earth with it” (ATP 312). Human music plugs into machinic phyla much older than the human species, lending it the capacity to circumscribe and ground an entire people in song (think of lieder). For Deleuze, Romanticism, especially of a solitary poet supposedly communing with “nature,” is where “the artist territorializes, enters the territorial assemblage” (ATP 338). In hindsight, the romantic territorialization of music onto landscape and nation prepared Europeans for fascism. Deleuze does not want to deny the formal innovations of a Beethoven, Debussy, or Bartók, but we should not deny the propensity in their music for seducing the listener into a comfort zone centered on nostalgia. In an essay on Nietzsche, Deleuze holds that modern music, the music of the future, should aspire to the powers of the elements directly. Music should overcome refrains, the heaviness national identity lent it, in order to create its own new people. In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side – there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song

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of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornello that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return. Dionysus knows no other architecture than that of routes and trajectories. Was this not already the distinctive feature of the lied: to set out from the territory at the call or wind of the earth? [. . .] Dionysus has no territory because he is everywhere on the earth. ECC 104 To affirm the Dionysian and revolutionary aspects of music is not, as it might be for the avant-garde, to obsessively battle every return to territory, but to make territoriality return differently by mobilizing the earthly affects beneath it. As we saw in the previous chapter, while elaborating his quasi-messianic concept of the people to come, Deleuze hears in the melancholic romanticism of Mahler’s “Song of the Earth” a grander, one might say universalist, exploration of rootlessness, upheaval, and the exotic. In an age of software synthesizers and profuse musical hybridization, a music of routes and trajectories instead of roots and spirit is within reach of millions, even if national song continues reasserting itself. While young musicians ceaselessly create new sounds the world over (difference’s eternal return), the music industry picks these up to commodify the romantic affects of home and homeland (imposition of the same). As quintessential refrain, music is a key site to understand the tension between territory and flow. A few critical notes to conclude. There are many in the vitalist tradition who have written about the harmony and rhythms of nature (von Uexküll 2010, for example, and Leibniz long ago). Often such poetics is nostalgic for a preestablished equilibrium, Mother Earth, or landscapes unspoilt by the noisiness of modernity and immigration. The concept of ritournelle might seem to risk a certain masculine Eurocentrism or even anthropomorphism, which aestheticizes animal, perhaps even plant and inorganic life as elegant and charming like a Baroque string quartet is. Another risk is that Deleuze and Guattari’s talk of music’s cosmic and elemental forces leads them into the Neoplatonic concept of the music of the spheres. But what Deleuze and Guattari undeniably do is draw attention to the politics in the play between stability and instability of territorialization. Because territorialization is an active, incomplete, and unprogrammable process it is always increasing the potential to become undone. Even crickets get confused. Any territory’s

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tendencies towards conserving its boundaries can abruptly flip over into tendencies for becoming. Humans are capable of making confusion and surprise a deliberate strategy in aesthetic or political construction. They do not compete for space, time, or mates the same way peacocks or leopards do. What the affective power of music demonstrates is that humans can set certain milieucomponents into contrapuntal vibrations in a manner impossible to fully trace back to their animal precursors.

Lines How to think the coexistence of tendencies towards conservation and towards sudden change within the same entity? Here it will be helpful to summarize the Deleuzian theory of lines. This theory can be read as a quasi-formal ontological framework for studying any spatial organization whatsoever. The little book called Rhizome, which would become plateau 1 of Mille Plateaux, was published in English as On the Line. The inspiration for Deleuze’s thinking in terms of lines and cartography comes from the work of the psychiatrist and educationalist Fernand Deligny who had asked teachers to draw maps of where autistic children wandered (ATP 4, 202). Amongst all humans, lines structure social space. But as with all Deleuzian concepts, they are but a special case of abstract machines permeating matter itself. The line appears right at the start of A Thousand Plateaus. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories: but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitute an assemblage. ATP 3–4 Earlier chapters discussed strata and speeds, and we have just seen that their articulation and holding-together at the level of life happens through territories. Now we have to add that these observable and measurable phenomena are only the actual realities

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brought forth by an underlying virtual diagram or map composed of lines of “segmentarity” or viscosity and “lines of flight” (lignes de fuite, occasionally translated as “lines of escape”). Every assemblage, every place or body, is constituted by processes of territorialization and stratification, which in turn are guided and undone by lines. What makes things stick together is an inter-entity stickiness that always threatens to dissolve into a deterritorialization. The segmentarity plateau provides a fuller picture of social space by turning to anthropology. It is important to note lines of segmentarity operate by coding space. They are either supple as found in small-scale societies or rigid as found in state societies. What Deleuze and Guattari call micropolitics is nothing but the creation of possibilities for molecular revolution by continuously mapping the dangers inherent in each kind of line. No line is essentially good: We are therefore made of three lines, but each kind of line has its dangers. Not only the segmented lines that cleave us, and impose upon us the striations of a homogeneous space, but also the molecular lines, already ferrying their micro-black holes, and finally the lines of flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative potentialities and turning into a line of death, being turned into a line of destruction pure and simple (fascism). ATP 506 Let us quickly review each of these dangers, the dangers woven into social space. After Foucault the calamitous nature of the rigid line should be clear. We moderns are massively constrained by sexual, class, and racial segregations and attendant mental categorizations, without which, Deleuze and Guattari add with Freud in mind, we become genuinely terrified. Imagine a world where districts, zones, airplane sections, toilets, not to mention prisons and asylums, are not keeping bodies in place. “Our security, the great molar organization that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system of overcoding that dominates us – we desire all that” (ATP 227). Life is literally impossible without the everyday segmentations we take for granted. But by securitizing and libinizing every bit of spacetime, modernity

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increases the potential for paranoiac drives and obsessional neuroses. The technocapitalist state is in itself sick and full of danger. We have already treated the push for securitization as endemic to a biopolitical state predicated on the constant threat of rioting, crime, and vagabondage. To say there is a line of segmentarity, and that it is rigid, is to alert micropolitics that there is a systematic topological directionality towards a certain order in what seem to be disparate spheres. The danger of the supple line is more direct: follow it too intently and you end in what Guattari calls microfascism. The intentional attempt to create a molecular or primitive line in opposition to the rigidity of civilization through practices like intoxication, esoteric communes, and Maoist groupuscules is risky in several ways. First, it can reproduce stratification and familial machines “in miniature,” which may indeed be more vicious than the larger assemblages one is trying to escape from. Guattari’s oeuvre is full of instances where he decries the reappearance of despotic patriarchy and codification in the radical left. Second, even if the molecular line doesn’t imitate the molar, its intentionality carries the very specific danger of fascism, which, as we saw in Chapter 2, Deleuze and Guattari define as a revolutionary but suicidal desire for identity (for example, the fatherland). Third, the supple and rigid lines combined pose the danger that is top-down power (pouvoir) itself. Totalitarianism uses the rigidness of a militarized bureaucratic partitioning of space, but it also requires the libidinal economy of a sadistic masculine regime for controlling others. “It is precisely its impotence that makes power so dangerous. The man in power will always want to stop the lines of flight” (ATP 229). The fourth danger is the most interesting one. It is routinely forgotten by critics and followers alike, yet “[a]ll the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison” (ATP 231). It is the danger of the line of flight crossing the wall [of signification], getting out of the black holes [of subjectivity], but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition. Like Kleist’s line of flight, and the strange war he wages; like suicide, double suicide, a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of death. ATP 229

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What Deleuze and Guattari call lines of destruction can be compared with Freud’s death drive (1990; itself conceived, it must be remembered, in the context of combat trauma). Both concepts refer to the tendencies in the human organism towards the repeated self-infliction of disappointment and pain which ultimately instantiate a thermodynamic tendency in animal life to return to the entropy of the inorganic. But Deleuze conceives lines of destruction as productive, ambiguous, and outward-oriented, whereas psychoanalysis understands the death drive as a regressive and counterproductive inertia. Lines of destruction are merely lines of flight that are redirected towards death instead of life. Where Freud opposes death drive and sex drive, Thanatos and Eros, Deleuze understands death as a modality of desiring itself. The famous suicide of the Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist, despite his youthful invention of a “plan to live” (Lebensplan) without tragedy, is one of Deleuze’s favorite examples after Artaud and Nietzsche of a literary war-machine. Kleist’s writing is creative and fascinating precisely because it is dangerous to literature, even to consciousness itself. “Kleist multiplies ‘life plan(e)s’, but his voids and failures, his leaps, earthquakes, and plagues are always included on a single plane. The plane [of immanence] is not a principle of organization but a means of transportation. No form develops, no subject forms; affects are displaced, becomings catapult forward and combine into blocks” (ATP 268). Whereas Freud’s death drive organizes organs from within the deep recesses of an unconscious structure, Deleuze’s lines of flight – of the Romantic Kleistassemblage for example – exist superficially at the same level as desire itself. Lines of flight can conspire to become lines of destruction as they intermingle with other assemblages. So any assemblage, place, or body contains a “map” of three bundles of lines: rigid or segmentary lines, supple or molecular or war-machine lines, and lines of flight, which can turn into lines of destruction. We will return to virtuality in Chapter  4 but we will close this subsection listing some advantages of this multilinear thinking. First, Deleuze and Guattari’s lines are what mathematicians call nonlinear (see DeLanda 2002). There is no one-to-one correspondence between lines and actual processes because the former interpenetrate and fold back on themselves. “Line” captures a nonphysical yet precise directionality and futurity particular to the virtual, allowing for an intuitive or “anexact” geometry of mutually

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contesting zones, zigzags, encirclements, and so on (ATP 367). Deleuze–Guattarian cartography offers a more experimental methodology than is available in most other formalist approaches associated with psychoanalysis and Marxism. Second, this cartography replaces post-Hegelian thinking in terms of two diverging tendencies (being and time, being and nothingness, being and event, death and life). There are bundles of entangled tendencies that converge in degrees and mutate into each other. Third, Deleuze’s lines also replace point-like essences. Places are partially defined by their boundaries and trajectories, by lines of segmentarity and movement, but these are always crisscrossed by lines of flight, which can turn into lines of abolition. Fourth, what Deleuze’s theory of lines in effect shows is that the virtual shadow of things is easiest imagined spatially. For science (phase space) and art (color palettes, dreamscapes, etc.) as well, the virtual is “spatial,” a topological outside immanent to physical spacetime, which thereby becomes far more encompassing than the x, y, z world of Descartes and Newton. Finally, despite appearances, this cartography takes emphatic care not to romanticize spontaneity, madness, or the death instinct: “so much caution is needed to prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of abolition or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a regression to the undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages?” (ATP 270). The aim is not to destroy places and subjectivity altogether. Kleist, Nietzsche, and Artaud are not examples for morality. A process of Deleuzian becoming proceeds only by skirting the dangers of the lines of the assemblages it moves through.

Segmentarity Institutions have been studied after Althusser and Foucault as apparatuses or machines within which modern people become integrated into the social formation as a whole. We can list the most important ones and see how each requires physical spaces dedicated to them: the family, religion, school, law, army, police, prison, workspace, leisure and sports, transport, shopping, food, media, art, science, government, and civil society. Deleuze and Guattari

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agree that institutions produce subjects but add that it is only as desiring bodies in dedicated spaces that people can be disciplined. What they call segmentarity occurs not through the mediation of ideologies or discourses but directly, bodies complying with what is expected from them without having to believe in or think about anything. Segmentarity is not specific to modernity but to humans as such, a continuation of territorialization all animals are involved in. In marked contrast to other critical theorists, this concretely spatial approach allows Deleuze and Guattari to be hopeful about change. Deleuze–Guattari’s politics of institutions is probably most clearly formulated in the segmentary plateau. From the rooms of a house to zoning laws to the split between south and north in the euro crisis, segmentarity is simply Deleuze–Guattari’s word for the functional division of space, for segregation at every scale. “The human being is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially segmented” (ATP 208). Segments necessarily correspond to the division of social groups, to social stratification. Segmentarity is either supple, as is prevalent in primitive societies, or rigid, in state societies and especially modernity. (I will follow the provocation of Capitalism and Schizophrenia and not include quotation marks for primitives and savages.) Building on Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze–Guattari are fascinated that all societies require segmentation to which their members strictly adhere. Think of secret men’s business amongst Australian aboriginals, or the many initiation rites involving isolation. But according to Deleuze–Guattari, amongst primitives there is no overarching diagram that organizes social space like there is in a state. Every sphere (burial, eating, sex, hunting) has its own segmentation that is always situational, in process, “operating by outgrowths, detachments, and mergings” (ATP 209). We already saw in the last chapter that for Deleuze–Guattari the fluidity of nomads makes them in some ways more supple than state societies. Far from being timeless and bounded this suppleness allows primitive segmentarity to dynamically interact with neighboring tribes and prevents larger power structures and territorialities like the state to form. Like Foucault, Deleuze poses questions around the claim of modernity to provide a greater degree of freedom of movement, thought, and speech. Appreciating how these ostensible

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freedoms are structured into spatial and subjective segments goes a long way in conceptualizing what modern power is. A second way segmentarities are distinguished is that they are binary, circular, or linear. Sexual difference is the most important of binary segmentations, but class, adulthood, and the Cold War are also powerful segregative binarizations and divisions of labor. Segments can also be organized in circles, often concentric and corresponding to geographical scale: my body, my house, my neighborhood, my country, my NATO. Medieval world maps were round and had Jerusalem at their center. Shamans are capable of jumping the circles of species and worlds. Segments are seldom literally circular, of course, but the primordial symbolism of the circle itself hints at the profundity of circular segmentarity. Finally, segments follow one another in time as along a straight and irreversible line. A life-course is a career in becoming segmented. “School tells us, ‘You’re not at home anymore’; the army tells us, ‘You’re not in school anymore’ ” (ATP 209). A weekday consists of segments devoted to bedroom, kitchen, bus, factory floor, canteen, supermarket, and pub. We are used to thinking of lifetimes as organized around thresholds in time – from school to army, from work to old age, from girl to woman – but these are necessarily also thresholds in space. In both supple and rigid segmentarity it is only while analyzing that we can distinguish binary, circular, and linear segmentarities, because in reality they overlap. Deleuze–Guattari give the example of the office building that is clearly segregated but with multiple segmentarities. “Hierarchy is not simply pyramidal; the boss’s office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower” (ATP 210). That is, even if bureaucracy is the most rigidly segmented assemblage of all, it also leads to the hallucinatory quality of absurd spatial and functional divisions we call Kafkaesque. The state is nothing but the resonance of many segmentarities, which in the later twentieth century became immensely centralized thanks to computing and surveillance technologies. But even if it is extremely governmentalized modernity has not gotten rid of supple segmentarity, just like state formations still encompass, in fact require, nomadism and warmachines. Certainly capitalism wants work/play, boss/employee, and woman/man binaries to be nimble and “flexible” if that creates profit. Conversely, it is not that primitive and traditional societies cannot already contain rigid segmentarities in embryonic form: a

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shaman charging money. Deleuze and Guattari hope for molecular experimentations that cannot be captured by the profit motive or reterritorialization on nostalgias for the primitive and the natural. Practices doing work, care, education, and food production in noncapitalist and newly supple ways abound, upsetting the spatial orderings of places under the capitalist state. This section has developed a framework for researching the dynamic and always-ongoing process whereby humans build their multiscalar geographies and segregations. A territory is a manner of fixing the heterogeneous material flows going through and sustaining it. A house, for example, is only consistent because, and while, its mortgage is being paid every month, its bricks are deteriorating only very slowly, and its housewife is singing while cleaning. There is a virtual cartography of lines that guide these physical movements and structures. Deleuze’s theory of place is sharply at odds with the prevalent bourgeois-humanist conceptions of place that, even in a supposedly anti-humanist Heidegger, does not consider how human place-making is embedded in machinic phyla of animal and even mineral territorializations. And he carries this debunking of humanism into rethinking the human body.

Bodies Places are established and changed by the movements of human bodies and their technologies. We don’t usually call Saturn or the Mariana Trench “places” unless they are probed or mapped. What is as important is that places and flows literally constitute our bodies as well. What I am made of is nothing but a particular confluence and configuration of care, food, money, ideas, prohibitions, and capacities from broader social formations that I ingested in particular places. What I can do in a shopping mall is inflected by the mall as a unique assemblage of architecture, prices, and other bodies. Moreover, as feminists and psychoanalysts have pointed out, our bodies are themselves our most intimate places, with their own psychic topography and stratigraphy of organs. It needs no reminder that “the body” is nowadays central to the humanities. It is often thought, on more or less phenomenological and existentialist terms, as the wellspring of true being. The body is thought to be eclipsed by representation, especially that of science. Often the

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focus is on the body, instead of bodies in the plural. Many approach embodiment with either piousness or wantonness, and do not sense the deterritorializing vectors of the bodies-without-organs traversing it at various scales. Against spiritualities and hedonisms, and coming from a more critical legacy shared with surrealism, Deleuze and Guattari understand the territorialization that is the human body as the site where society wages its most maleficent warfare, especially in a process they call faciality. Turning again to the biology of animal movements and territoriality, their conception of how humans are differentially embodied in and through space owes much to a philosophical system they understand to support this biological approach, that of Spinoza.

Affects It is in his writings on Spinoza that Deleuze provides the most sophisticated framework for studying bodies and their interactions. Unsurprisingly, the spatial dimension is fundamental to Spinoza: his physics of bodies follows in the footsteps of Aristotle, Galileo, and Descartes, and there can be no physics without explicit concepts of space and movement. Like these precursors, when Spinoza says “body” he means any coherent entity in physical reality, like a stone, a hammer, or even a sound or a waterbody (see SPP 123). A body is a local modification or “mode” of the cosmos itself, that is, of nature. And “God” is merely another name for nature. Wine, a cannon ball, an elephant, or a star are different chunks of the same vast continuum of spacetime. Ultimately there is only this one primordial “substance.” Things relate to this one substance as color relates to a chameleon. Spinoza seeks to theorize thinking and happiness as capacities particular to human bodies. His fundamental ethical concern is how to rationally build an open and free society (EPS chapter XVI ). Human flourishing happens only in the coming-together and mutual strengthening of diverse human bodies. Only a rough outline of Spinoza’s masterwork Ethics (1996) is possible here. Spinoza is largely anti-anthropocentric. Building on Galileo’s classical concepts of inertia and momentum, Spinoza’s physics smoothly becomes biology, politics, and religion. A body is defined by its conatus (“striving,” often left untranslated), a basic perseverance to remain in existence and overcome obstacles. It

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keeps on moving in a straight line unless stopped by another. All bodies are composites and are distinguished only by the particular dynamics of their constituent bodies, the particular relation of “speeds and slownesses” (a theme recurring in A Thousand Plateaus). Bodies are continually moving and affecting one another strictly according to the laws of nature. If they “agree” they can combine to form more complex and durable bodies. Spinoza’s example (in a letter) is blood as composed of lymph and chyle (EPS 210). If there is very little agreement, bodies will destroy each other. Spinoza’s example is poison and an animal body. In fact, what we call “evil” is nothing but a kind of encounter that can’t be digested (EPS 247). With Spinoza we obtain a rich framework for examining socioecological formations as constellations of many organic and inorganic bodies (and their “minds”) cohering thanks to the fact that they agree with one another and avoid what may destroy them. Spinoza also presents an influential theory of human feelings and emotions, more precisely called affects. Affects emerge when one human body induces a qualitative change in another that it encounters, which is thereby affected by the first. Every encounter, whether habitual or traumatic, leaves an imprint. Affects are the mental or ideational counterpart of the physical collision of bodies and exist between individual minds. In a situation with many bodies one can speak of a contagion of affect as it propagates itself amidst them. An individual’s mind is nothing but the accumulated affects that its corresponding body has engaged in, a kind of complete résumé of its spatial history. Obviously the overwhelming majority of affects remain unconscious, in fact less-than-human. Still, Spinoza avers that we can learn to bring them to reason by forming adequate ideas of what exactly happens to our bodies when we encounter others. We can see why he is often considered a precursor to Freud. In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy Deleuze says Spinoza’s theory of affects amounts to an ethology. Ethology is the study of animal behavior in its ecological niche, strongly underlining the spatial and active aspects of movement. The Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (2010) calls such a species-specific perceptual niche an Umwelt, literally surroundings or milieu, and often translated as lifeworld. One well-known example Deleuze gets from Uexküll is the tick (SPP 124–25). The tick climbs the tree towards the light (first affect). There it remains, sometimes for years, until it smellsfeels a mammal body passing beneath (second affect). It falls onto

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the mammal body and promptly crawls towards its warmest furless spot to suck blood (third affect). Then it lays eggs and the process can start anew. Deleuze says a tick’s life is these three affects, which are at once encounters, sensations, and actions. In other words, a tick’s milieu has just three dimensions or components (ATP 51, 257). A human’s milieu consists of many more and far more complicated affects, of course, but the ethological principle is the same. There are problems with the ultra-conservative Uexküllian notion of lifeworld, which Deleuze uncritically inherits through Heidegger. First, Uexküll deliberately wants to have nothing to do with sex and evolution. A tick has to reproduce, and its genome will have to come into play whenever it develops and acts. Second, on Deleuze–Guattari’s own framework, milieus overlap and are stratified. Through evolution humans share some physiological parameters with ticks and deer and cauliflower. Furthermore, our intestines contain trillions of bacteria without which we would not exist at all, so it cannot be that our actions are geared to only what we perceive as humans. Third, as Uexküll builds erroneously on Kant, the notion of Umwelt intrinsically colors animal perception in an all-too-human hue even as it allegedly decenters the human point of view. Does the tick not undergo affects before it climbs the tree? Uexküll has to assume that he knows what it’s like to be a dog and a tick. At one point Deleuze and Guattari say a “racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox” (ATP 257). Who says so? The type of labor performed for humans can hardly override differences in organs and instincts that evolved over millions of years. To start with, oxen cannot mate with workhorses. And fourth, as Deleuze and Guattari’s own example of domesticated animals reminds us (“individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, ‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog,” ATP 240), bodies should be studied within their particular assemblages, which in the present includes the planetary flows of capitalism. The notion of lifeworld or Umwelt qua world makes it seem individual organisms and entire species live in bubbles. A Spinozist theory of affects after Darwin should instead yield a far more finely stratified ecology of competing and interpenetrating populations moving at multiple spatial and temporal scales. In short, reducing animal embodiment to perception is a grave regression to something akin to natural theology. To be modern and enable exchanges with the life sciences, psychoanalysis,

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and Marxism, perhaps it is better to drop the lifeworld concept altogether. Affects occur at the surface of bodies, but knowing them is only a first step. What matters is ultimately what an encounter allows a body to do from now on. The “essence” of a Spinozian body is nothing but its power (puissance in French, potestas in Latin), its capacity to act, which continually changes as the body interacts with other bodies and new circumstance (this is the basis of Negri’s influential reading of Spinoza). A Spinozian essence is therefore not an essence in the Aristotelian sense. Deleuze’s famous question about Spinoza’s system captures this dynamic reconstitution of and competition between bodies: “What can a body do?” (EPS chapter XIV, resonating through A Thousand Plateaus). Lest we think Deleuze and Spinoza want to reduce bodily powers to either their biological survival or their billiard ball-like momentum, the aim of their philosophies is to make human bodies enhance the powers specific to them, that is, the continuously evolving powers of thinking, feeling, and improving life for others. To use an ancient term, in humans power is virtue. Philosophy, science, art, and politics depart from merely filling biophysical needs. By understanding how nature works humans can reach “an intellectual love of God” and develop powers unique to every body within the species. On Deleuze’s more Nietzschean reading becoming-active is the key to Spinozist ethics (see NP 57ff). Ethics consists of remaining open to chance and overcoming the ideologies and reactionary forces keeping bodies passive and afraid. We do not even know of what a body is capable, says Spinoza. That is: We do not even know of what affections we are capable, nor the extent of our power. How could we know this in advance? From the beginning of our existence we are necessarily exercised by passive affections. Finite modes are born in conditions such that they are cut off in advance from their essence or their degree power, cut off from that of which they are capable, from their power of action. EPS 226 A naive reading might be that Deleuze is celebrating power in a libertarian or even protofascist way. With the previous chapters in mind it should be clear that human bodies are from birth almost

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completely dependent on substrata of provisioning, infrastructures, and earth sources like fossil fuels. To become-active is not to escape these dense networks, but to use what they afford to gain a more independent foothold and thereby contribute to the sustainable happiness of one’s society and even humanity in general. Power as virtue is giving back. Unlike for mainstream liberalism, for Spinoza– Deleuze it is never a question of the individual becoming stronger at the expense of others but, on the contrary, an interlocking of powers constructing a new power, one that rules itself through reason and complementarity. Moreover, as the quote above implies, it is rare and difficult to obtain knowledge of how one’s body is ensnared by chains of causes. In fact, by a priori separating the individual from the rest of space and professing s/he already has the power to obtain wealth and happiness, Deleuze would say that liberal morality has itself been a huge limitation on what modern bodies are capable of. The constitution of society is nothing but the spatial and temporal workings of affect, ever-widening chains of intercorporeal connection over space, bodies habitually and mutually accumulating advantages over time. Though this is barely of interest to Deleuze, Spinoza calls democracy the best political form because it exists without a transcendent notion like king, nation, or patriarchy legitimating it from on high (EPS 259ff). Democracy comes closest to the immanent production of the social. Through Deleuze’s reading, like on Negri’s soon thereafter, it is possible to read Spinoza’s egalitarianism as a precursor to Marx (Hardt and Negri 2004). On this reading, rather than inverting Hegel, it is the Spinozist physics of bodies that strengthens Marxism’s claim to materialism and mass politics. However, it is also true that Spinoza’s metaphysical defense of republicanism is a justification not only of the liberal state and hence of social hierarchy and privilege (complete with a typical disdain for the masses), but also of the market. Spinoza admired the cosmopolitanism of the Dutch moment of the early capitalist worldsystem. Bodies exchanging goods and increasing each other’s power so they can liberate themselves from church and community: this is basically the radical immanence of capitalism. Capitalism is a system that brings bodies and places into ecologies of mutual affecting at an exponential rate, thereby increasing their powers to act. Ultimately, however, Deleuze’s question of what bodies can do

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is meant to combat the capitalist state and organized religion (“affective combat,” ECC 145). In fact, for Spinoza–Deleuze it might not even be bodies that are the most important, but intensities, difference, space itself. Logically speaking, the complete emancipation from the various forms of servitude separating bodies from what they are singularly capable of would entail a new kind of society not based on private profit-seeking, communism in Marx’s cryptic sense.

Bodies-without-organs No discussion of Deleuze’s theory of bodies is complete without discussing the body-without-organs (BwO), possibly the most notorious and obscure concept in Deleuze’s toolbox. With BwO it becomes clear how he differs from the phenomenological approaches to embodiment in the legacies of Heidegger, Sartre, and MerleauPonty. Deleuze and Guattari mostly agree with Foucault’s notion of “docile bodies” (1977: 135ff) but are also indebted to Marxism and psychoanalysis and the close relations of these with surrealism. Phenomenology and the fields it influenced – humanistic geography, environmental ethics, experiential pedagogy, and so on – tend to presume sensation and movement are processes bodies engage in as persons, as entities that say “I” and thereby narrate and desire themselves into being as distinct entities. For Deleuze–Guattari and Foucault, instead, individuation is a process done to bodies rather than by them. The BwO concept can also be seen to critique the celebration of the organic and the organismic, which characterize the vitalist philosophies of life before Deleuze. Deleuze’s very first writings aim to redefine embodiment against, or at least beyond, Sartre and phenomenology. In two early essays on femininity and perversion in Proust (which he did not want republished, perhaps because of their brazen misogyny), one reads: I am tired? This, first of all, does not mean much. For my tiredness is not my own; it is not me who is tired. “There is tiredness.” My tiredness is inscribed in the world in the form of an objective consistency, of a soft thickness of the things themselves: the sun, the uphill path, the dust, the stones. SP 87

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These early essays show that Deleuze was already fascinated with three nonphenomenological dimensions of embodiment: involuntary and impersonal events like fatigue, tics, and frowning; ecological components that determine what a body can do; facial components like freckles, wrinkles, and eyebrows (“the problem of eyebrows,” DW 21), as much as or even more than the gaze and the voice. (We will soon return to faces.) Freckles evoke a mysterious and a perfect élan, a supple trajectory issued from I know not what throwing-stone. They are like bubbles that arise from within, that appear on the surface but do not inflate, without popping and without volume. One can run one’s hand over them and not feel them, they do not rise above the skin, they are a simple blossoming on the surface, a proliferation without thickness, an enervating charm. [. . .] This indifferent and inexorable presence, which one can see but not touch, I will call the “noumenon”. DW 21 A stutter, a gait, a peculiar way of wearing one’s hat or speaking German: these are what constitute the “thickness” (épaisseur, a central word in French for materiality) of bodies, what individuates them before there is mind or will. Such elements are not phenomena but noumena in the Kantian sense, that is, not available to consciousness. Similarly, addictions and the compulsion to repeat trauma, what psychoanalysis calls the death drive, interest Deleuze throughout his life because they show a body is unique yet not one’s own. His essay Coldness and Cruelty on Leopold Sacher-Masoch, from whom the term masochism derives, contains a wealth of suggestions for reconceiving drives as distributed and not simply lodged in the individual unconscious. The role of fur and ritual in masochism shows Deleuze that it has its own Umwelt autonomous from that of sadism (CC 42). He says the repetition under aegis of the death instinct can even transport the pervert to mystical heights (CC 120). Difference and Repetition reframes the death drive as “an internal power which frees the individuating elements from the form of the I or the matter of the self in which they are imprisoned” (DR 259). The death drive, or death instinct as Deleuze prefers it, is an inorganic impulse in bodies, not a will-to-die but an expression of desire like the pleasure principle (DR 113).

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Bodies must be vivisected to see how their organs are interpellated and intercalated by biopower. Any organism is organ-ized. For humans this means all body parts are stratified and overcoded by society. Freud and Lacan deserve great credit for initiating an international production of clinical and critico-literary material showing how human subjectivity requires disciplining organs, starting with the mouth, the anus, and the genitals. In fact, without this territorialization of sensation and rhythm we cannot talk of organs at all. “In itself” an animal body is an inchoate aggregate of heterogeneous tissue and fluids that will in the second instance serve as the raw material for its organ-ization. Neurosis and psychosis, but also everyday tics, burps, and similar eruptions, show the organization is never complete. The body-without-organs is this rudimentary, unformed body. But since humans are only human through language, parenting, adornments, and dwelling, this body without any organization does not physically exist. The reality of the BwO is virtual. Furthermore there is no way to conceive of one BwO on its own as it is merely a region of a larger socius. Deleuze says the BwO is “full” in the sense that it is an indefinite array of intensities of which the actual body with its organs and affections is an ongoing reduction. In The Logic of Sense, in order to venture beyond the limitations of the concepts of schizophrenia and partial objects in Melanie Klein, Deleuze borrows the notion of a body without organs from Artaud. Artaud used it only once, in a 1947 radio performance titled “To have done with the judgment of God.” We saw when discussing war how Artaud’s avant-garde redefinition of theater implies a liberation of theatrical performance as something that cannot but deal with cruelty. Deleuze is especially taken by how Artaud’s own bodily suffering as expressed in his self-made language demonstrates how insidious interiorized morality really is, or what Artaud calls the judgment of God. As relayed artistically, Artaud’s schizophrenia and suicide can be held to embody a kind of victory, even glory, in a singular combat against Judeo-Christian biopower. Triumph may now be reached only through the creation of breath-words and howl-words, in which all literal, syllabic, and phonetic values have been replaced by values which are exclusively tonic and not written. To these values a glorious body corresponds, being a new dimension of the schizophrenic body,

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an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation, respiration, evaporation, and fluid transmission (the superior body or body without organs of Antonin Artaud). LS 88 Deleuze makes of Artaud’s concept of judgment a normalizing force coextensive with secular segmentary modernity. One can easily appreciate how in courthouses, offices, gyms, job centers, and porn movies judgment in this larger sense orders organs and bodies. Almost all the words spoken in these spaces are what Deleuze and Guattari call order-words, an important concept in plateau 4 on linguistics, which allows for studying language in its performative spatiotemporal efficacy. “Every order-word, even a father’s to his son, carries a little death sentence – a Judgment, as Kafka put it” (ATP 75). Against such order-words and such organization, Artaud offers a body “at war with the organism” and its preordained functions. This body is not “without organs” per se but without organs as organized by and in the name of the organism, which is usually maintained in a very well-specified equilibrium by exterior conditionings. Deleuze wants to redefine bodies as dense spaces of intensity. The BwO is the body in embryo, but one that stays with the body for its whole life. What is an embryo or an egg? As we will see in the next chapter, an egg is jam-packed with chemical and electrical gradients, or potentialities, which can be called more-than-material, more-than-spatial. “The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree – to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced” (ATP 153). The BwO is the preindividual lining of pure potentiality “around” the organism. It is the limit of deterritorialization the organism continually brushes up against. To put it more geographically, the organism is a stratum “on” the body-without-organs just like soil is composed from subterranean processes: “the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluviums, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoiling that compose an organism – and also a signification and a subject – occur” (ATP 159). But geography is metaphorical here, intensive not extensive. “The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines,

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traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors” (AO 19). The previous section related how any entity’s lines of segmentarity, viscosity, and flight together constitute a map for its development. Crucially, however, unlike maps in the usual sense there is absolutely no resemblance between the BwO’s virtual lines and its actualized body. Hence topology would be a more precise term than cartography. In addition there are a few ways the egg analogy is misleading. First, we must take great care not to think a BwO has just one preprogrammed developmental trajectory like an egg has. Second, its intensities are always changing, usually curtailed under segmentarity but sometimes “expanding” and “deepening.” A human body’s developmental destination or destiny develops as the body itself develops. Deleuze’s ethical or artistic ideal is then not to return to amniotic indifference, to the “oceanic” bliss of the maternal womb. Third, not the organs but the organism is the enemy (ATP 158). Desire does not come from nowhere but must be rechanneled according to unprecedented and unpredictable criteria. Finally, BwOs are per definition ambiguous and often spell suffering for the bodies they are instantiated in. They are always already scrambled, affecting each other constantly and ultimately oozing together on to a Spinozist plane of immanence. “Drug users, masochists, schizophrenics, lovers – all BwOs pay homage to Spinoza” (ATP 154). The plateau titled “How to make yourself a body without organs?” is dated November 28, 1947, the date of Artaud’s radio performance. It gives a more nuanced appreciation of desire than Anti-Oedipus. Addiction and psychosis show “making” a BwO, that is, “liberating” a body from its biopolitical conditioning, requires a battling with oneself and is never in itself “good.” Deleuze’s intensive ethics is a kind of militancy at the intraindividual level. Such ethics is a “perpetual and violent combat between the planes of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the surfaces of stratification that block it or make it recoil” (ATP 159). Returning to what the previous chapter said about such combat, it is not between two opposed “sides”: body against society, anarchism against authoritarianism, creativity against control. Its topology is more complex precisely due to the workings of desire under

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capitalism. Because every territorialization requires desire, it already contains the propensity for a deterritorialization, which is then usually immediately reterritorialized on a new level. Even if we consider given social formations, or a given stratic apparatus within a formation, we must say that every one of them has a BwO ready to gnaw, proliferate, cover, and invade the entire social field, entering into relations of violence and rivalry as well as alliance and complicity. A BwO of money (inflation), but also a BwO of the State, army, factory, city, Party, etc. [. . .] The strata spawn their own BwOs, totalitarian and fascist BwOs, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency. ATP 163 Fascist BwOs have a “cancerous” spatiality because they can find desires to link up to inside everyone and in every social sphere. BwOs can harbor suicidal becomings-plant or becomings-animal, as in anorexia (ATP 543 n58). The intensive ethics in the experimentation with drugs and sexual subversion has to walk a fine line between the order imposed by the socius and the chaos of black holes, microfascism, and the death drive. But it is important to note the capitalist state by default forces all bodies to experiment with their BwO. What can be confusing is that Deleuze and Guattari push the BwO concept from schizoanalysis to political economy and universal history. In rethinking the abstract machines of entire societies as virtual “bodies” they seem to be critiquing a traditional ideological analogy wherein institutions and social groups are “organs” keeping a social formation in balance, as in Hobbes and the Indian caste system. When Anti-Oedipus says money is the “full body” of capitalism, the tyrant’s body that of the state, and the earth that of primitive society, it is naming a virtual extremity that is essential to each mode of production. A full body or socius is what simultaneously allows for production and hence a social formation to repeat itself. It contains a societal death instinct or locus of “anti-production,” which attracts the society to dissolve into the inorganic. “The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable” (AO 8). Just like the BwO at the level of a mentally ill person includes the possibility of catatonia or madness, there is a tendency towards self-destructive

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excess in social formations: tribes wiping out others, imperial overstretch, big banks collapsing. The previous section explained how Deleuze–Guattarian territorialization is any process whereby something becomes temporarily stabilized by regulating the flows of mass and energy traversing it. Now, “territorialization” is never just a metaphor. Though it is difficult to imagine because of the large time-scale speciation is also a kind of territorialization of the spatial organization of the organism. In the configuration that is the hominid body, for example, organs have to keep to their place. Organs do not tread on each other’s territory, and physiologists describe these borders on the body-plan. Speciation means a new map of life is drawn because the organs have shifted. Over millions of years a species is stable in relation to others in both topological and biogeographical space. But in Deleuzian evolutionary theory deterritorialization comes first. As organisms move and slightly change in relation to their parents the functions of their organs migrate and mingle “on” its body-without-organs, until a population is sufficiently different to speak of a new species. Hence “the prehensile hand implies a relative deterritorialization not only of the front paw but also of the locomotor hand. It has a correlate, the use-object or tool: the club is a deterritorialized branch” (ATP 172). After Deleuze we can appreciate more clearly how the hominid phenotype is not the product of random genetic mutation as in neoDarwinian dogma, but of organs put to use in incrementally novel ways. Human evolution is a positive feedback loop of brain size, motor skills, and language. However, driving this loop is the uniquely bold and imaginative exploration of continents and islands. Humanity emerged from millennia of experimentation with milieus and with desire, continuously “deepening” the species BwO. The big toe, body hair, menstrual cycles, and vocalization were over countless generations deterritorialized, at one point converging across a certain threshold so that an entirely new megastratum was formed, the alloplastic. In this megastratum the possibility arose of absolute deterritorialization in the form of language, religion, art, and so on. It is this immense plasticity of the human species that allows not only for philosophizing but the inhuman forces of capital, the internet, and the Anthropocene, forces that now affect much of the rest of the planet.

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Ultimately, the BwO concept is meant to avoid the nostalgia, increasingly prevalent since the 1960s, for an unfragmented and wholesome body. But this inspiration from Artaud does not mean Deleuze wants to be done with reason. Phenomenology and new age attack Descartes for conceptualizing space as empty, for dichotomizing mind and body, for forgetting the materiality of the earth and for privileging the faculty of vision. Deleuze’s philosophy is not averse to the coldness, perhaps even the dualism, of Descartes. Rather, it is that Descartes theorizes the thinking subject as already given, guaranteed by God and separate from the body’s affects (see DR 86). For Deleuze it remains crucial to think but it happens through the body. In fact, as Difference and Repetition famously puts it, it is the world itself that forces us to think (DR 139). The Deleuzian cogito is a collective achievement that only takes place in the midst of assemblages. It is never a question of simply affirming the body at the expense of the mind.

Faciality The theory of faciality (visagéité) is where Deleuze and Guattari provide a systematic approach to the spatial differentiation of human bodies under a capitalism turned biopolitical. Faciality is an elaboration of the concepts of segmentarity and striation, but it gives more attention to visual and psychical processes. By being assigned faces, bodies are also assigned places. Faciality is especially helpful for studying racial segregation because it allows understanding how the spatiality of race is internalized. Faciality “is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels” (ATP 167). It is actively desired. Making a body-withoutorgans, liberating bodily capacities from ideology, is the difficult process of dismantling faciality. Deleuze and Guattari first make a distinction between the body and the Face (ATP 170). The body can feel itself through its many senses and organs, its volumes and depths, its body-without-organs. Faciality instead radiates primarily through the faculty of sight. A face in the sense Deleuze and Guattari give it has no depth but penetrates the body, whose capacities and feelings it then severely limits and orchestrates. Organs become reorganized and overcoded so as to reproduce the faciality system, beginning with the eyes. Gestures,

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words, organs, and subjectivities become “facialized,” even nonhuman objects and entire landscapes as correlates of bodies. Social differentiation is a machine sorting bodies according to a hierarchical tree-diagram. Man or woman? White, black, or brown? Rich, middleclass, or poor? Hipster or nerd? Sexy or ugly? Faciality demands that every body and every place conform to prior categories or else a new one is created (trans, mulatto, bohemian, nerd-hipster). Fashionobsessed capitalism and city centers are thoroughly facialized. In fact capitalist cities cannot exist without a relentless faciality. Faciality requires what Deleuze and Guattari call a black hole/ white wall system. White wall is their term for media representations, capitalism’s ever-thickening mass of signifiers. Signification is made of “walls” because it consists of rock-hard surfaces presenting a blinding and unavoidable fullness. As many a postmodernist critic has argued, capitalism produces signs with vanishing referents at an exponential rate. While Deleuze and Guattari cite the close-up in film as a prototype (ATP 168), today we might pick the Skype videocall. Signifiers are defined by hyperclarity, “redundancy” in the information-theoretical sense Guattari adopts from Bateson (1972: 409ff), repeatedly skimming the threshold of information overload. Times Square is the place on the planet where there is the highest degree of facialist redundancy, where the white wall is densest and exalted as such. Most of our waking hours (and perhaps after), ubiquitous video screens bombard us with dazzling images, advertisements, and notifications. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance the white wall was limited to paintings that facialized Europe through the fantastic landscapes structured around Christ and saints (ATP 178). Since the 1950s, however, bodies are inescapably entwined with luminous codes telling them constantly what to desire, where to go, and who they are. Guattari pinches the term black hole from astronomy to develop Freud’s notion (1990) of death drive. A black hole is a place, or rather nonplace or unplace, at the level of the unconscious. It sucks in desire and is undetectable by the subject itself. With its maximum of gravity or intensity a black hole is the threshold where a system becomes deterritorialized beyond consistency, a deadlock that, if given in to fully, becomes catastrophic. Addiction and psychosis are the primary examples of black holes at the scale of the human individual (ATP 285). At the scale of social formations there are black holes or microfascisms in every sphere, from sports and music

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to offices and communes, in which affects are absorbed without remainder. Microfascisms can add up to totalitarianism: “every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole” (ATP 214). Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was a black hole (MRB 258). We have already seen why the masses and fascism are both molecular. Black holes emerge when desire goes into overdrive and becomes self-reinforcing. But, as with Freud’s death drive, the danger of black holes necessarily remains latent for most people. They are offset, precisely, by identification and the white wall of signification. The black hole/white wall system sucks bodies into faces. Faciality happens so automatically, we should call it inhuman (ATP 171). Like computers and capital, and driven by them, faciality is imperialist, penetrating almost everything moderns do. An example so splendid that Deleuze and Guattari almost predicted it, is Facebook. What is “social” about social media, what is “smart” about smartphones? It is that their screens are black holes that press subjects with their heads up against white walls. Facebook facializes 1.8 billion bodies into predetermined national-linguistic, economic, sexual, and racial boxes. The resulting grid has to be extremely elastic in order to accommodate for populational differentiations, but the software and profit motive ensure its basic diagram of segmentarity remains extraordinarily rigid. Facebook shows that faces (categories, segments) are strongly desired by the very bodies they marshal. As Foucault (2003) would have argued, the illusion of freedom and diversity that the neoliberal internet promotes are at the basis of contemporary biopower. Computerization has plugged bodies directly into the flows not just of investment and surveillance but social stratification. The faces of Facebook are far from mere representations, therefore, but refract, reinforce, and bleed into physical spaces and routes. Assemblages like Facebook, superhero comics, airport security, and talkshows pigeonhole bodies according to a central panoptic eye or CPU , which Deleuze and Guattari call the abstract machine of faciality (ATP 177). This abstract machine is in turn structured by gradients and distinctions that are flexible but always radiate from a center. The one face or box that all others are compared to is that of “White-Man” (176), the racial and sexual default for all faces everywhere, even beyond the solar system. The White-Man

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face coincides historically with the aggressive self-centering of Europe through painting and cartography since the fifteenth century. Modernity itself was established only through appropriating colonies and la mission civilatrice. In retrospect, Deleuze and Guattari say (178), the prototype of the White-Man face is that of Jesus Christ, whose Europeanized image became prevalent during the Crusades and early-modern humanism. Along with capital and advertising, faciality must spread geographically. Encompassing ever larger populations, it has to diversify, yet continues to establish man and whiteness as the universal norm. Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic. . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. ATP 178 With faciality we have a highly original theory of the intrinsic racialization of humanism and the intrinsic spatiality of race. Race is a system not of exclusion and othering through language and prejudice but of differential inclusion through machinic assemblages, which of course include language and prejudice. Sedentary and rigid segmentarity emerge within a circuit of neurotic desires, visual representations, and the partitioning of space. Deleuze and Guattari speak a few times of face–landscape correlates, “landscapity” (paysagéité) and “landscapification” (ATP 172, 181). Like faces, landscapes are stereotypes through which the apparatuses of education, architecture, and literature distinguish and standardize identities. The global norm for landscapes is Euro-American. They are everywhere becoming Disneyfied, suburbanized, securitized. To conclude this section on bodies, the insidiousness of faciality entails there is no pure or primordial space of embodiment that can be redeemed outside the categories of race, sex, and status. The segmentation of populations precedes the individualization of bodies, who have little wriggling room left because of the tight

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nexus of space, image, and desire that is electronic capitalism. Perhaps this theory of a facializing panopticon without outside is too pessimistic. Perhaps the intercultural ambiguities and transnational popularity of Bollywood, kung-fu, and manga hint at a more multipolar imperialism in the future, which is already eroding the White-Man standard. But as long as there is capitalism, bodies and their innermost desires will be territorialized onto market-based categories. Capital, the full body of capitalism, has nowhere reached its absolute limit yet.

Cities More than half of the human species lives in cities. Cities have for centuries been the crucial backdrop to industry, trade, and democracy. But what sort of a place is a city? It is a machine that segments and differentiates bodies. The strongly racialized destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is one of the most compelling illustrations in recent memory of the ecological workings of stratified society. More philosophically, the concepts of difference and politics are from the beginning entwined with the concept of the city. Ultimately the scale of the urban seems less central to Deleuze than it is to other spatially sensitive theorists like Benjamin and Lefebvre. Guattari mentioned cities more often, and was engaged with radical architects and planners like the informal communist group CINEL (Centre d’initiative pour de nouveaux espaces de liberté, see SS 34, 59). In Japan, Brazil, and the US he showed keen interest in urban social movements. Still, conceptually, the built environment as such seems less urgent to Guattari than the art, free radio, and alternative psychiatry taking place within cities. As geographers complain most theorists do, Guattari thinks of urban space as a mere container of activity instead of its active dimension. What he and Deleuze do offer, nevertheless, is a more fundamental ontology of space that can be applied to rethinking the city.

Planes Before turning to cities as such, however, we need to elucidate Deleuze’s theory of planes. Deleuze’s concept of plane of immanence

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is central to his metaphysics and will help determine geophilosophy’s proper vocation in relation to religion, art, and science, hence the city. As we saw in the first chapter, the practice of philosophy is a constructing of concepts and involves an “architectonic” with strata. A great philosopher is one who discovers a new plane of immanence that grounds his or her new concepts. Philosophy continues only because it regrounds itself, which is an ongoing groping in the dark rather than a flash of enlightenment, and it is never done alone: how, then, can we proceed in philosophy if there are all these layers that sometimes knit together and sometimes separate? Are we not condemned to attempt to lay out our own plane, without knowing which planes it will cut across? Is this not to reconstitute a sort of chaos? That is why every plane is not only interleaved but holed, letting through the fogs that surround it, and in which the philosopher who laid it out is in danger of being the first to lose himself. WP 51 The plane of immanence is the reality of the virtual in which physical processes bathe and are nourished. The concept might seem to have a pantheistic tinge, especially when synonyms like chaosmos are offered. But the plane of immanence is first of all a post-Kantian not medieval-theological concept. A plane of immanence is a bottom-line of any manner of thinking. It is what a particular philosophical practice presupposes as its particular transcendental condition. There is a One-All (a Neoplatonic name for God) particular to every consistent philosophical system, but it is “full of” holes, not a monolithic bloc. Philosophy faces two dangers: getting lost (in the fogs of madness or stupidity), and getting stuck (getting mired in contradictions or believing it has solved problems once and for all, becoming reterritorialized on the one One-all, that is, monotheism, the theory of everything, the party line, and so on). Understanding immanence as planar, as something to construct while traveling through it, allows Deleuze to stay clear from grounding thought in a pregiven transcendental subject as Kant does. It is no coincidence the chapter dedicated to the plane of immanence in What is Philosophy? is full of geographical metaphor.

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If philosophers create their plane of immanence, artists create a plane of composition. When an artist succeeds in extracting a consistent affect or sensation from a particular assembling and transformation of materials, the resulting artwork “ascends” into an aesthetic plane of composition. As with the plane of immanence in philosophy, the plane of composition in art is fully immanent, though it can and often does piggyback on religion’s vector of transcendence. The plane of composition is the potentiality of the thickness in the materiality of materials. It has nothing to do with any hermeneutic depth or what the art “represents.” It is the task of modernism (Deleuze’s preferred current) to expand this plane of composition. It could be said that Mondrian was a painter of thickness; and when Seurat defined painting as “the art of ploughing a surface”, the only support he needs is the furrows and peaks of unglazed drawing paper. This is painting that no longer has any background because the “underneath” comes through: the surface can be furrowed or the plane of composition can take on thickness insofar as the material rises up, independently of depth or perspective, independently even of the chromatic order of color (the arbitrary colorist). One no longer covers over; one raises, accumulates, piles up, goes through, stirs up, folds. WP 194 By materializing the plane of composition in its affective corporeality, art creates a refrain, a territory, a house that filters the universe (WP 179ff). All art is like music and like architecture: “Art begins not with flesh but with the house” (186). The third kind of plane is the plane of reference, and is particular to science. One cannot do science without the strictest of discursive rules like peer review, experiments, deduction, and so on. Reference is what allows for ruptures to take place precisely by retroactively rewriting the centuries of work done by one’s predecessors (of course “reference” here encompasses much more than simply references). The topological space of references is continuously updated and sometimes revolutionized in what is called a paradigm shift. If anyone would pretend Euclid is not forever changed by Riemann, for example, they would desperately try to deny science itself. To characterize this irreversible but two-way (retrospective

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and rupture-anticipating) temporality of science, Deleuze and Guattari could have quoted Newton’s famous apocryphal line: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That is, science opens onto the future by boldly reworking its past. Hence Newton can be “derived from” Einstein as much as Einstein “breaks with” Newton (WP 124). By insisting on a synchronic plane of reference, Deleuze and Guattari excise the ideological notion of unilinear progress. Like philosophers and artists, scientists remain conversation partners maintaining a transhistorical and transnational network topology of statements on lasting “states of affairs” (122). Unlike the plane of immanence with its strata, the plane of reference is retroactive and discontinuous, constituting a time of “bifurcations, slowing-downs, and accelerations” (124). A science grows in jolts against a backdrop of conservatism holding it back. What does all this have to do with cities? Deleuze’s planar thought develops an anti-evolutionist, rhizomatic, radically constructionist approach to the history of collective creativity. Cities in all civilizations have been centers of learning that cut through the three planes. This does not mean that they were preparing teleologically for the kind of smart city celebrated in gentrifying neoliberal capitalism. Philosophy, art, and science are only genuinely creative when reconstructing their planes and leaving behind the histories that overdetermine them. The importance of Deleuze’s antihistoricist concept of immanence for thinking the city is even clearer when we turn to another plane, which is always already incipient in the creative act, the plane of organization. The plane of organization, also called plane of transcendence or plane of development, is the virtual blueprint whereby a process takes shape and its perfection is evaluated. While a plane of immanence does not exist outside of its expressions, a plane of organization attempts to become transcendent, to become actualized as separate representation or law. Every molar identity has a plane of organization, insofar as it is ordered from outside itself in alignment with others like it. A plane of organization can per definition be replicated and transported. Planes of organization shape a chunk of reality according to a predetermined plan. Here we should remember that the French plan is both “plan” and “plane,” and can signify map, blueprint, diagram, layout, outline, program, scheme, schedule, strategy, and so forth, in

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addition to level, standard, and plane. Brian Massumi’s translation in A Thousand Plateaus therefore has “plan(e)” to alert the reader to these connotations (see ATP xvii). A plan(e) of organization is given beforehand, assigns places to the elements of an assemblage, and prescribes their forms and agencies. In contrast, a plane of immanence is a field of potentialities particular to the present situation or process that cannot be represented, only thought and sensed. Instead of a recognizable structure, a plane of immanence or consistency is an assemblage’s unreplicable and indivisible virtual side, a mass of pure events (ATP 507). The plane of immanence is somewhat akin to Spinoza’s God: it “has no supplementary dimension; the process of composition must be apprehended for itself, through that which it gives, in that which it gives” (SPP 128). Euclid, the first formal theorist of space, is crucial to A Thousand Plateaus because his work is where the plane of organization is most succinctly and consequentially instantiated. Euclid provides the subsoil for organizing large human populations. It is impossible to think of state societies without engineering and geometry. Buildings, roads and bridges, canals, land surveying and planning, ownership, navigation, remote sensing, and colonization are quintessentially Euclidian ventures even before they are problems of materials. Euclid achieved an unprecedented degree of formal systematicity but thereby gave us the most sophisticated representation of the plan(e)s of organization that the state requires for segmenting land. Moreover, we have seen in Chapter 2 that the axiomatic method Euclid invented is central to the functioning of capital. General equivalence and abstract quantifiability would, many centuries later, feed into the capitalist money mechanism and segmentarities like in geomarketing. Geometry’s utility for governmentality makes Deleuze and Guattari suggest, building on Virilio, that it is inherently a majoritarian science (ATP 212). Euclidian space is striated in contrast to the flexibility and proliferation of n-dimensional spaces in Riemann’s geometry. Cities from ancient Greece and Rome to nineteenth-century Paris, twentieth-century Manhattan, and twenty-first century Shanghai are built so as to prevent the eruption of uncontrollable smooth space. Right angles, isomorphy, and light are the stuff of a rationally planned city, “a laying-out of territories, a substitution of space for places and territorialities, and a transformation of the world into the city; in short, an increasingly rigid segmentarity” (ATP 212).

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The conception of space as homogeneous also suffuses the countryside. In the plateau on capture Deleuze and Guattari argue that the political economy of agriculture presupposes a plane of equivalence (ATP 440ff). The central question about urbanization, demographic growth, and the state is what the threshold is that separates them from the mere stockpiling of agricultural products. For Deleuze and Guattari the enclosing of the earth into portions that can be bought, rented, consolidated, and compared – this is precisely what is called land – could only emerge through the striated abstraction of geometry, through conceiving parcels as homogeneous series. Following Ricardo, they call ground rent “the very model of an apparatus of capture, inseparable from a process of relative deterritorialization” (ATP 441). They continue: The land as the object of agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility of plots of equal surface area). That is why the earth, unlike other elements, forms the basis of a striation, proceeding by geometry, symmetry, and comparison. The other elements, water, air, wind, and subsoil, cannot be striated and for that very reason bear rent only by virtue of their emplacement, in other words, as a function of the land. The nomadological term “capture” is not simply an affixing and a delineating but an increase in potential for deterritorialization, whether through despotism, trade, or religion. Building on Lewis Mumford, Deleuze and Guattari hold that stock combined with labor and taxation is the original excess that allows for an urban “megamachine” to emerge (ATP 444). We saw they also agree with Marx that capitalism requires a process of “primitive accumulation” through which states and elites violently appropriate resources, but they go further. Violence is even more “primitive,” built into the system of land itself, “a violence that posits itself as preaccomplished, even though it is reactivated every day” (ATP 447). As nomads and indigenous people know only too well, land is in essence an assemblage for excluding and exploiting populations. Once possessed, land in early modernity also turns into landscape thanks to the stereotyping processes of facialization.

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The detachment and flattening that accompany geometry lie at the basis of what is called “development,” which is in turn the condition for global capitalist accumulation. This is why Deleuze can write: “there is no revolution so long we remain tied to Euclidian geometry” (DR 162). But while an overhaul of cities and the earth might glean inspiration from topology, capitalism in the internet and quantum age is itself already heavily Riemannian, even Einsteinian. We should beware, therefore, of making Euclidian geometry responsible for everything oppressive. We saw that there is no straightforward analogy or homology between the various models of smooth and striated. Precisely as majoritarian science the more geometrico served the revolutionary ontology of Spinoza very well. A pragmatic politics of space has to distinguish between geometry, quantification, and science as such, and their use by biopower and geopower. Now, plans never pan out perfectly. Conversely, the chaos of events also always harbors the potential for order. It is important therefore not to simply oppose the two planes. The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely, the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assemblages or microassemblages. ATP 270 Deleuze and Guattari are often held to simply advocate disorganization and the collapse of representation, but their position is more nuanced. Creative practices like science, art, philosophy, and, we should add, politics, have to be planned and strategic to some extent in order to bring about new consistencies. The urban milieu is replete with both the possibilities for creativity and its reterritorialization in the interest of power. A topological approach to creativity should envision the planes of consistency and of organization as intersecting. The strata of a practice are then mapped onto a surface instead of interpreted

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(their “deep” meaning), so that the practice may subtract itself and start anew.

Networks Once the masses of villagers can no longer avoid it, a threshold of centralization is passed, which is simultaneously a threshold of new deterritorialization. Cities (like in the Mediterranean world but elsewhere too) and empires (like in Asia but elsewhere too) start forming. In the gradual materializing of urban systems the explicit geometry of land and engineering becomes supplemented by the implicit network topologies of the sea, the market, and religious and imperial power. Inspired by Braudel (1973), Deleuze and Guattari argue that cities can only develop as part of regional networks. As Guattari starts his response to a question in Brazil about politics: “I very much like Braudel’s way of thinking, particularly his notion of ‘world-cities’ ” (MRB 249). Cities are materially constituted by regional and long-distance flows of goods, money, administration, soldiers, pilgrims, and animals, which in turn tap into the machinic phyla of the earth. From Jericho to Sydney there would have been no urbanization without trans- and intercontinental circulation. The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation, and of circuits; it is a remarkable point on the circuits that create it, and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits; something must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polarization of matter, inert, living or human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization, because whatever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized enough to enter the network, to submit to the polarization, to follow the circuit of urban and road recoding. ATP 432 The densification of the human species into cities is the correlate of globalization. Cities form a planetary layer distinct from the

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lithosphere, a massive and accelerated rerouting of matter and energy and a key feature of the Anthropocene. Deleuze and Guattari make many interesting points about networks in the context of the society of control. The previous chapter finessed the Foucauldian approach to power by emphasizing the ubiquitous machinic speeding-up of life under technocapitalism. Every gadget that supposedly gives individuals more choice in fact imprisons them further into databases dividing them into manageable chunks (they are “dividuals,” not individuals), even if there isn’t one Big Brother overseeing all operations. We don’t have to stray into science fiction to find a control mechanism that can fix the position of any element at a given moment – an animal in a game reserve, a man in a business (electronic tagging). Félix Guattari has imagined a town where anyone can leave their flat, their street, their neighborhood, using their (dividual) electronic card that opens this or that barrier; but the card may also be rejected on a particular day, or between certain times of day; it doesn’t depend on the barrier but on the computer that is making sure everyone is in a permissible place, and effecting a universal modulation. N 181–82 The dystopian action movie In Time depicts such “universal modulation” and the barriers between rich and poor, good and bad, that Guattari and Deleuze are imagining here. In the twentysecond century every body is split from within by preprogrammed death. People can buy commodities and access to city zones only by accelerating their own end. The elite is blessed with many centuries of life, which they selfishly squander in enclaves of luxury. The inscription of inequality into zones is accompanied by psychic intensities, black holes, revolving around a monetary system of equivalence. Of course science-fiction has plenty to allow thinking the tight interplay of bodies and surveillance in the city, but the concept of the society of control holds that repression is already operating in a quite nightmarishly seductive way. Deleuze returns to the society of control while critiquing communication and information in the lecture “What is the creative act?” In contemporary capitalism power works no longer through confinement but by forcing people to move and communicate

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incessantly. “Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future” (TRM 322). While highways are celebrated as vectors of freedom, and indeed Deleuze himself is fond of imaginations of nomadism like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), they also have a darker side. The highway assemblage, precisely as system, orders populations. It facilitates state and capitalist control by creating homogeneous serial subjectivities in little boxes. It is all the more terrible by virtue of its dire environmental and health consequences. Seen from above, the entangled traffic flows in Los Angeles or Beijing are clearly arteries of the capitalist megamachine. For pedestrians and animals and the poor neighborhoods they slice through, however, highways are catastrophic. To survive, a homeless person has to get habituated to the feeling of worthlessness when trying to cross a six-lane road, while the drivers whizzing past must get used to ignoring her. More than a radically different “sense of place” for driver and pedestrian, therefore, the highway is a powerful machine for affectively and spatially sorting bodies. We shouldn’t stop at this bleak picture of hypermobile society. Cities also foster politics and citizenship, as the etymology of these words famously imply. For Deleuze, the cosmopolitan and egalitarian pretensions of a city are directly given with its being intermeshed with others. In this he follows Spinoza, who extolled the republican and multicultural virtues of his native Amsterdam in its Golden Age. Whether in Amsterdam or Athens, the politics of democratic horizontality map directly onto the rhizomatics of trade. In the rhizome plateau we read: “Nothing is more beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine” (ATP 15). But the fact that the smooth spaces of Amsterdam’s art and liberalism were built upon and from the speculation-fueled, monopolistic, and militarized striations of the Indian Ocean world, is a geographical irony well worth analyzing. The political potentiality of urban networks can be understood to be a crucial aspect of the ontology of both Spinoza and Deleuze.

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Both are careful not to make it seem as if humans are innately driven to cooperate, live together, and globalize. Rather, it is anxiety that propels people to give up some of their individual powers and abide by the rules of the city and the state, which are in turn subject to improvement. Ideally, what results is that ever more people come to live joyfully according to reason and mutually beneficial affects. “Thus Spinoza describes the city as a collective person, with common body and soul, ‘a multitude which is guided, as it were, by one mind’ ” (EPS 266, quoting Spinoza). City-dwellers retain the capacity and right to think freely even if they must accept laws necessary for the flourishing of the collective. The city is the best milieu for becoming rational and ethical, for networking and for ethical people to live in (EPS 268). But what Deleuze here calls “the good City” does not come easily. After all, “it is with cities as with individuals: many causes, sometimes imperceptible, intervene to pervert nature and precipitate ruin” (EPS 267). To understand the difficulty of urban life is to understand human nature. Following an argument harking back to Aristotle, What is Philosophy? reminds readers that the city is imbricated in the project of philosophy itself. From the polis to the Enlightenment salons philosophy has presupposed densities of exchange, learning, and free time. In fact, the “geo” of geophilosophy seems to have more to do with the city than with the earth (WP 86ff). Instead of the liberal celebrations of public space and commerce as subsoil for Athenian philosophy, however, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the project of deterritorialization that is philosophy has to evade its reterritorialization in the form of mere opinion and what is useful. Two millennia onwards, opinion saturates the public sphere. It is true that mediatized capitalism reopens the possibility of critical thinking on a massive scale. But critical thinking has to leave behind its urban, institutional, economic, and national substrata. [Capitalism] is the new Athens. The man of capitalism is not Robinson but Ulysses, the cunning plebeian, some average man or other living in the big towns, Autochthonous Proletarians or foreign Migrants who throw themselves into infinite movement – revolution. [. . .] But what saves modern philosophy is that it is no more the friend of capitalism than ancient philosophy was the friend of the city. WP 98–99

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Deleuze and Guattari seem to be hopeful here that international urban networks and solidarity between white working-classes and migrants will allow the urban multitude to become-revolutionary together with the geophilosopher. Somehow a short-circuit of universalization would emerge between the abstraction of concepts and the anomie of the banlieues. Such politics goes beyond mere citizenship. Like in the ancient city-state, actually existing pluralism under capital creates the new utopian possibility of a people-tocome that is not contained by any one nation or a state. Capitalism has to be declared the enemy, or at least not a friend, just like Socrates said he belonged to the world and not to Athens. Deleuze and Guattari’s hopefulness here could be criticized for not explaining how the masses would become-philosopher, and how geophilosophy would become “of the people.” Still, their own political networking gives some guidance. Guattari is quite lucid in his work, especially Molecular Revolution in Brazil, about the difficulties inherent to politics. One lesson from the failed revolution of May 1968 and its post-communist intellectual fervor is the fact that urban segregations prevent local movements from gaining broader traction. There were groups for reflection [like Foucault’s radical-left Prison Information Group in which Deleuze and some planners were involved] that set out to function at the same level as groups for research and intervention. The results of the experiments were not negligible. It all happened in parallel with the maintenance of the neighborhood committees, and the development of struggles in the immigrant worker sectors, and in feminist, homosexual, and other movements. But the problem was that none of those modes of action was able to pass to another level of struggle. The only link with that other level of struggle, the struggle of other sectors of the population, continued to be the old systems of sectarian groups, the old party and union systems. [I]f there is an absence of essential links, [such groups] eventually lead to processes of specialization and degeneration. It’s like a kind of wave ceaselessly breaking on itself. MRB 232 How can political groups connect to each other without passing through parties and unions? Which concepts incite, sustain, and

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deter urban revolution? How to get philosophers on the street? These are questions at the heart of an engaged philosophy of the city. And with populations more interlinked and mobile than ever before but also increasingly segregated and pacified by consumerism, the question of the responsibility of the philosopher towards the city is pertinent as never before.

Ghettos There is one specific theme concerning cities in the Deleuzian corpus that warrants closing this section with: the urban periphery. A billion humans live in slums. Every city and every state has regions that are neglected and mostly invisible to the public sphere. On the one hand there are poor areas: ghettos, favelas, trailer parks that can be dense or remote but per definition lack investment and infrastructure. On the other hand there are spaces that exist only to organize the flows of the general population, like highways with their petrol stations, strip malls, parking lots, motels, public toilets, and dumpsites. The latter are what Deleuze’s cinema books call any-spaces-whatever. Few of us like to visit them, and yet they are integral to the capitalist system. As we will see shortly, Deleuze sees in them a vague beginning for an impersonal ethics of urban modernity. First we need the global perspective. Elaborating on their interest in capitalist world-systems, Deleuze and Guattari regularly remind us that inequality and exclusion exist at all scales: displacement belongs essentially to the deterritorialization of capitalism. As Samir Amin has shown, the process of deterritorialization here goes from the center to the periphery, that is, from the developed countries to the underdeveloped countries, which do not constitute a separate world, but rather an essential component of the world-wide capitalist machine. It must be added, however, that the center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment, its reservations and its ghettos as interior peripheries. AO 231 We read here the basic Marxian argument about derelict and impoverished spaces: they are produced alongside and because of

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the accumulation of wealth. Just as Africa was systematically pillaged during imperialism and prevented from developing once formally independent, neighborhoods and entire regions within the rich countries are quasi-deliberately kept poor. The margins are seen by the center as little more than sources of ultra-cheap labor, spectacle (gangsta rap, white trash, supposed breeding grounds for Islamic State), and legitimation of an increasingly high-tech police and carceral state. Another avenue concerns a more metaphorical use of the term “ghetto,” which, like in common parlance, Deleuze and Guattari use to talk about the self-segregation of political identities. The linguistics plateau warns that subnationalist struggles become regressive reterritorializations if they don’t merge with other minoritarian struggles into a universal movement of self-estrangement. Minorities, of course, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority. [. . .] Becomingminoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming. ATP 106 True cultural-political independence is a becoming-minoritarian that happens amongst existing cultural and linguistic minorities, themselves already hybrid. The vote for Brexit is the best recent example of desire for political independence being perverted into a nationalist ghetto mentality. Politics for Deleuze and Guattari should emancipate its practitioners from every claim to “community,” a word they rightly recoil from. Revolutionary group subjectivities cannot but be modeled on the dynamic heterogeneity that is the global city. But instead of being anchored in ethnic, subcultural, sexual, or proletarian neighborhoods – Chinatown, the Castro, Harlem, Hackney – revolutionary politics grows like crystals from the incomplete universalities that happen to be present.

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Guattari is keenly aware of the ecological, military, and racial logics behind the concentration of poverty, especially in the US . His later work analyzes the transversal interplay of capital accumulation and pollution of all kinds, at one point naming an agent who would become all too familiar: In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he “redevelops” by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology. TE 21 Deleuze and Guattari are also all too aware that any uprising will be brutally suppressed. “Who but the police and armed forces that coexist with democracies can control and manage poverty and the deterritorialization-reterritorialization of shanty-towns? What social democracy has not given the order to fire when the poor come out of their territory or ghetto?” (WP 107). The fascism of Trump and the Syrian refugee crisis have once again demonstrated the affective and geopolitical importance of the archaic figure of walls, belying everything liberal democracy is supposed to stand for. Detroit is the paradigm case of the slow warfare against ordinary citizens that capital is capable of inflicting, with a once-thriving progressive city reduced to rubble, while Gaza City is the paradigm case of homes and homeland turned into permanent camps in the name of democracy. As we saw, for Deleuze and Guattari racism is a system of inclusion not exclusion. Incarceration is the most perfect form of inclusion. After 9/11 a generalized state of emergency has become the new normal in the world and urban order, and it makes no essential difference whether the regime is colonial, dictatorial, liberal-democratic, or nominally socialist. Deleuze and Guattari always go further than critique. What political possibilities do abandoned places contain? Detroiters and Palestinians try to fight back. Informal economies are per definition characterized by a continuous destratification and a making-do. It is the refuse of the capitalist mainstream itself, with its tourist

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spots, multinationals, and massive waste, that allows poor people to create their own shadow cities largely outside the center’s purview: the city is the force of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it back into operation everywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside but also inside itself. The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of worldwide organization [like multinationals, supranational organizations, and armies], but also of a counterattack combining the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town; sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant. ATP 481 No doubt Deleuze and Guattari romanticize the bricolage of materials and occupations that is the favela. However, it is not “resilience” or “entrepreneurship” they celebrate, not even the neighborhood as such. To prevent being striated again, a relatively autonomous holey space must continue to undermine the mainstream. It has to become inspiring for others across country borders to become a substratum for a longer-term revolution of collective life. Molecular Revolution in Brazil is full of moments where Guattari advises his activist interlocutors to forge dependable transversal connections between various spheres of social experimentation. As we saw, he is wary of the widespread belief within the radical left that “alternative” movements will solve society’s injustices at the local level only, and that larger organizations are per definition bad. Sometimes cutting oneself off the rest of society works to reinvent assemblages (he gives the example of Freinet schools), but sometimes this breeds insularity. I don’t think that there can be an all-encompassing formula for that we are calling alternative. It’s precisely because of this that the analysis of the limits of each experiment seems to be fundamental. [. . .] An experiment totally restricted to the favelas can learn things from the [wider] social field that are certainly fundamental. But it’s also possible for certain kinds of techniques and a certain kind of [political] representation to develop there, completely

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separate from certain realities of industrial societies, and therefore presenting a character of limitation of a different kind. What defines an alternative experiment is its processual character. MRB 144 Cautious optimism about the processual self-organization of the urban peripheries is in place because they are not as segmentarized and facialized as the centers are. But unless a broader struggle to experiment with alternatives to capitalism can ensue (as happened briefly with Lula), these areas will stay poor, or its inhabitants expelled to form new slums.

Any-spaces-whatever Deleuze’s most sustained treatment of cities comes in the Cinema volumes, even if it is subordinate to a theorization of time. Against the humanism in most writings on the topic he sees some positive sides to the alienation that sociology has traditionally identified with the city. The loss of community is also the beginning of a properly modern kind of time in which the past is not fixed and the future disturbingly open. Though he does not develop this line explicitly, Deleuze clearly thinks that becoming-stranger can be a conduit for further becomings, for universalization and revolution. In Jean-Luc Godard, one of his favorite directors, Deleuze sees neither a nihilistic assessment of inescapable violence nor an existential-Marxist critique of ennui but a deeper ontological appreciation of the fluidity offered by the postwar city for a collective nonsubjective grouping of nascent possibilities for mutation. In the French new wave, Deleuze insists, “we see a birth of a race of charming, moving characters who are hardly concerned by the events which happen to them – even treason, even death – and experience and act out obscure events which are as poorly linked as the portion of the any-space-whatever which they traverse” (C1 213). The whatever (quelconque in French, tantum in Latin) is important throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre, though mostly implicit. It goes back to the Kantian transcendental gesture, the turn towards a more-than-empirical formalization of what it is to think. Kant empties the object of thought from all concrete content, resulting in the “transcendental object.” This universal and empty placeholder

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is then variously filled with qualities and quantities during actual perception. Kant (1999) writes about a “transcendental object.” Beneath the perception of a tiger or the idea of Venice there is the basic structure of objecthood waiting to be made concrete. Difference and Repetition argues this “object = x,” this degree-zero “object,” is not simply formal and general but virtual and generative. The any-object-whatever lies at the basis for the series of differences that “fill” it and always already displace it. It is what sets off and spurs on subjectivity as such. On Deleuze’s reading, the Kantian object = x becomes nothing else than the productive restlessness that Freud calls the unconscious (DR 105, 120), and Lacan the phallus (DR 103, see also TRM 187ff). But the x as placeholder can be applied to conceptualizing other systems than subjectivity. Just like number is based on zero, language is based on word = x, history on action = x (DR 299), and humanity on person = x. Elsewhere Deleuze mentions “the empty square” (le cas vide, TRM 184–89), which allows games to proceed, like in the 15-puzzle. “Whatever!” is in colloquial US and UK English itself an interjection that sarcastically mobilizes the transcendental structure of language to close off conversation (“I can help you if you let me.” “Yeah, whatever.”). In short, the whatever is a convenient notion through which Deleuze’s transcendental method retrieves a genetic and generic attitude of humans towards the world before they are objectified and subjectified. In The Logic of Sense the whatever allows him to write about the transcendental event: “there is the future and the past of the event considered in itself, sidestepping each present, being free of the limitations of a state of affairs, impersonal and pre-individual, neutral, neither general nor particular, eventum tantum” (LS 151). In his last essay, “Immanence: a life,” Deleuze speaks of any-man-whatever, or “only” man, homo tantum. Such a life, “a life” in itself, is one anyone would identify with even though, or because, there is no concrete body that actualizes it (TRM 387, forgetting the gender bias for a minute). In the cinema books the whatsoever becomes geographical. Anyspaces-whatever are the bland, nameless, derelict zones created either by disaster (war, earthquake) or by large-scale planning that often become ghettos or ruins. Deleuze argues that such spaces are central to postwar modernist cinema, especially Italian neorealism and the French new wave.

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Why is the Second World War taken as a break? The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These were “any spaces whatever”, deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these anyspaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring. C2 xi The affective and material consistency of postwar cities is based on space = x. Cinema 2 chooses not to dwell on the traumas characterizing these cities’ populations, the persecutions (purging of fascists and collaborators), or the geopolitics of capital injections for infrastructure (Marshall Plan). In hindsight, and for cinema, what is more relevant to Deleuze is a mutant future-directed people braving the aftermath of catastrophe with their reinventions of urban life. One of the best examples of the cinematic rendering of this making-x of the postwar urban is Rossellini’s Europa ’51, which also shows how an ethics is incipient across class-segmented space. In Fellini’s La Strada, the roadsides, piazzas, farms, half-built apartment blocks, and Esso station capture the inevitable quotidian ugliness Deleuze wants us to focus on. These spaces do not have the coherence of “landscapes” as they are not facialized and remain unnamed. Though instantly recognizable, they are interchangeable. The place-concepts “Anywhere, USA ,” suburbia, and no-man’sland give further substance to the importance of such places to capitalism’s spatial fabric. More often than war, it is a rampant homogenization forced onto places by chain stores and cynical realestate moguls like Trump. Guattari adds in The Three Ecologies that the biophysical surroundings of such places are also turned into toxic wastelands. The intellectual critiques of urban homogenization usually come from conservative corners. If philanthropists seek to protect “heritage,” what they cherish is a thoroughly modern assemblage of landscapity and heteropatriarchy. The humanist lament about declining face-to-face interaction is inseparable from a reactionary idealization of the village under feudalism. With the central question of Anti-Oedipus in mind, Deleuze and Guattari would rather ask how poor and working-class people come to enjoy and even identify

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with any-spaces-whatever. And in Cinema 2 Deleuze asks more philosophically how the disconnectedness and emptiness of such spaces usher in a different way of inhabiting place that is not quite a place. The collective embodiment of a new mongrel temporality amid rundown infrastructures and dilapidated housing projects is potentially revolutionary. This is what makes countryside conservatives so fearful and disgusted. While the Italian neorealists often showed a Franciscan kind of redemption arising from the ruins of the city and the state, Deleuze wants to emphasize the basic fact that they necessarily contain the potential for unexpected encounter and invention. Even if he wouldn’t discount the monotonous violence and scandalous neglect, he suggests that starting afresh is easier in derelict apartment complexes or on the road than in “tightly knit” neighborhoods. Moreover, by using the term “race” in relation to any-spaces-whatever in the quotes above, Deleuze seems to be suggesting the obscure collective becomings of the post-apocalyptic city can escape the segregative racism that the urban and media order otherwise institutes. Deleuze would have been fascinated with the 2005 riots in the banlieues north of Paris and those of 2011 in England. The unacknowledged whiteness of French universalism and British multiculturalism is bound to incite violent resistance from below. This resistance was in turn bound to make state and public even more reactionary. Similarly, as we have seen, Deleuze knew well what the geographical conditions are to which the Palestinian intifada responds. Rioting is the only public expression possible from desperate populations living in any-space-whatever because they cannot offer their “opinions” in the media as mainstream society does. But as they only bring down repression and condemnation harder than before, such acting-out is not a true becoming. Riots and terrorism are black holes, all the more tragic because they are built into the spatial order of underdeveloped zones. One cannot expect an organized revolutionary politics to emerge from any-space-whatever simply because it is on the margins and escapes faciality. In any case, Deleuze’s interests in the cinema books lie with aesthetics and metaphysics more than with politics. What is important is first to rigorously conceptualize the openness of spaces structurally ignored by the capitalist state. What Deleuze sees in the depiction of the ghetto in US black cinema, for example, is not just the “replacing a negative image of the black with a

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positive one,” not emergence of “consciousness.” Instead, he sees a new art form, a politics at the level of redefining cinema itself, concomitant with a new way of treating the lives and characters associated with the city (C2 220). Deleuze returns to any-space-whatever in one of his last essays, “The exhausted,” on the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Deleuze writes that Beckett’s use of image and voice corresponds to an “extenuation” or “exhaustion” of the “potentialities of space”: space must be an any-space-whatever, disused, unmodified, even though it is entirely determined geometrically (a square with these sides and diagonals, a circle with these zones, a cylinder “fifty metres round and sixteen high”). The any-space-whatever is populated and well-trodden, it is even that which we ourselves populate and traverse, but it is opposed to all our pseudoqualified extensions, and is defined as “neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away”. ECC 160, quoting Beckett Deleuze admires Beckett’s geometry, especially in the television play Quad (available on YouTube), in which one to four cloaked characters perform a kind of walking ballet on percussive music across a square. The square is with minimal content, yet not simply formal, in continuous movement, yet highly ordered, “a closed, globally defined, any-space-whatever.” The bodies are almost interchangeable, “modified by nothing other than their order and position” (ECC 162). But their movements are extremely demanding and tiring because the dancers must avoid bumping into each other. Beckett’s theatrical space is therefore perfectly filled up, selfsufficient, or as Deleuze has it, exhausted. “To exhaust space is to extenuate its potentiality by making any encounter impossible” (ECC 163). What Deleuze calls Beckett’s “depotentialization” of space in Quad is a deliberate foreclosing of the event and of surprise. This seems to be the opposite of the urban any-space-whatever in postwar cinema, and a fortiori of political autonomy in favelas. By using the same term for Beckett’s and Rossellini’s spaces, however, we can sense how the former might be a possible abstraction of the

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latter. Perhaps theater (or good television), modern painting, and dance can think space more abstractly than narrative cinema can (ECC 173). These arts therefore reveal a density and an immanent horizon that is impossible for narrative cinema to portray. This late essay of Deleuze’s makes room for using Euclidian geometry’s impetus for equivalency against itself. Beckett captures universalizability as a generative feature of anonymous bodies that exhaust one another across a strictly limited space in a mindless determination to follow the plan(e) of organization that structures it. It is this universalizability, this plenitude in emptiness that Deleuze finds in impure form in the wasteland and the roads of modern capitalism, though he avoids speaking of universality per se. As “conveyor belt” (ECC 163) of population traffic, any-spaceswhatever retain the potentiality for resisting the homogenization of space and thinking not despite but because of the limitations imposed from above or outside. While the characters of gritty urban cinema like that of Godard or Tarantino are far from the automata choreographed by Beckett, they too tip over from organization into immanence by being pushed to the planar limits of their spaces by the medium itself. For Deleuze as for these artists, places are never made of just three or four dimensions. Cinema and other art like comics and graphic novels help us obtain a sense of the thickness of the possibilities already available in the megacities of late capitalism. Modern urban space is the stage for the post-Kantian project of philosophizing human temporality as given by itself to itself without the security of a plane of transcendence of a God or a despotic state. The city is historically also the stage for exploring what human bodies are capable of doing in conjunction with one another, which as Spinoza shows is a question of ethics and politics. Any-spaces-whatever show clearly, if often painfully, that the city is not a static background of life but actively implicated or enfolded into the capacities of bodies. As assemblages, as active territorializations triggering deterritorializations, cities are always happening.

Events This chapter ends by turning to a concept through which Deleuze’s contribution to metaphysics becomes clear in a distinctly spatial

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manner, the event. Many modern philosophers have worked on this concept, from Whitehead and Heidegger to Badiou. Generally they aim to formulate what is meant when we say something happens. A frown, a storm, the fall of the Roman Empire, lightning, falling in love: these are clearly real but what are they if they’re not things or bodies? As events cannot be easily measured, classified, or even delineated in space and time, they put some strain on materialism. And yet as undeniably essential to language and to life, hence to ethics and politics, philosophy cannot but address them. The Logic of Sense is the principal place for the Deleuzian conceptualization of the event, and its principal sources are Stoicism and Leibniz. In the most basic terms, events are transformations of bodies and things insofar as these come together with others. For example, a blush does not happen simply to a face but to a body within an embarrassing situation. Events are absolutely unique and immanent to this coming-together, over here. They are singularities, as Deleuze has it following mathematics (LS 15th series). An event is a hinge-point where a habitual course of things is interrupted. Furthermore, events are strictly impersonal. They happen to subjects not because of them. On Deleuze’s theory it makes more sense to say “there is blushing” than “he blushes” or “she blushed.” Verbs in the infinitive like “to grow” and “to blush,” and the fourth person singular (“it snows,” “one can be sure”), are therefore precise ways to express Deleuze’s idea of the event. Infinitives and impersonals are abstracted from places and times, yet necessary to characterize their specificity. For the ancient Stoics, reality is made up not only of things and bodies or corporeals (somata) but also of what they called incorporeals (asomata). Incorporeals are of four kinds: sayables (what we now call propositions), void, time, and place. These incorporeals are real changes in and of reality just like physical things are, but they “subsist” instead of exist, that is, they are a kind of nonbeings that are real in relation to language and the human perspective. What Deleuze borrows from Stoicism is a way of conceptualizing sense – that which language achieves – as emerging between the material and the ideal. He also recuperates the Stoic theory of time as split between eternity, personified in the god called Aion, and the passing present, personified as Chronos (LS 23rd series). These concepts of sense and eternity lead Deleuze to suggest a Nietzschean ethics of amor fati (LS 149–51) committed to

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avoiding all resentment and to remaining equanimous, even lighthearted, in the face of inevitable negativity and difficulty. There are two major innovations Deleuze offers. First, he says physical things and bodies are made up from events that remain independent, subsisting on the cusp between the virtual realm of what could happen and what is actualized. There is no absolute dualistic difference between events and materiality, therefore, because the latter is the “hardened” residue of the former. Events are like indices in the semiotic sense of an underlying tension or intensive difference. A blush is a sign referring to a psychical and physiological complex that the situation triggers, which in turn is made up of events that refer to more series, and so on ad infinitum. Second, Deleuze says all events populate a pure Event, an event = x, which is nothing but the plane of immanence subtending the possibility for any event to take place at all. An ethics of the event is one that evaluates the encounters and circumstances according to their immanent criteria. That is, it is intensely spatial. The event is strictly neutral, and only becomes good or bad from within a certain perspective. We already saw Deleuze sees combat as the quintessential event. “Why is every event a kind of plague, war, wound, or death?” (LS 151). Deleuze is not being a somber Romantic here. What interests him is the overwhelmingly ambiguous and decisive nature of events like disease and misfortune. Occasionally events do become joyful but only because they are actively made so. We can see how badly readers misread Deleuze when they hold him to be an Epicurean hedonist, even if Anti-Oedipus might give that impression. As an example of Stoic ethics he mentions Joë Bousquet, who was paralyzed in the First World War but drew a singular strength from his largely bedridden life to become a poet. “To the extent that events are actualized in us, they wait for us and invite us in. They signal us: ‘My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it’ ” (LS 148, quoting Bousquet). Thinking in terms of events means seeing the I as but a temporary and shifting effect of inhabiting an impersonal shell that demands to be inhabited well. One notices an overlap with Buddhist ethics, though Deleuze himself shows more interest in Zen philosophies of paradox and void (8 and 138–39). To be ethical is then to “become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events” (149). Deleuze’s ethics of the event is passive in the

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sense of awaiting the surprise of encounters, but active in the sense of turning such surprise into possibility. Being worthy (digne) of the event has become a veritable formula of Deleuzian ethics and one that directly involves space. Deleuze’s revitalization of the Stoic notion of incorporeal transformation is closely linked to the concept haecceity, which he retrieves from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus (who also provides him with concepts of individuation and univocity). A haecceity is the “thisness” of something, what makes this thing distinguishable in time and space, as opposed to its “whatnesses” (quiddities) or describable qualities. There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. ATP 261 Examples of haecceities abound in modern literature. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre the “subject” of a storyline can be a wind, a temperature, or an evening, instead of persons or animals. Haecceities are a subset of events: they are that which happens to something so as to make it what it is. In today’s geography following Doreen Massey (2005), place is not a bounded and stable entity as it is implicitly in everyday ideology, but an ongoingness always already constituted by a tumultuous exterior. For example, in patriarchal ideology, home is felt and represented as the familiar realm whose cosiness derives from keeping the world of (masculine) work and public affairs outside, while in fact there is no domesticity without the state. When geographers say place only exists through space, through its outside, this is not a “constitutive outside” without qualification as it tends to be in discourse theory, but a particular set of connections literally making the place an absolutely unique envelope of spacetime. A city forms through the gradual heaping-up of currents of magma, seeds, populations, food, and cement, which uniquely intersect in

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this location and no other. What a city is is nothing but the continual coming-together and stratal accumulation of flows, many of which come from very far away. Every place is singular and has to be or there would be no interconnecting at all. As a series of events, place can have neither essence nor fixed volume and time-span. Furthermore, from the teenage bedroom to the European Union, place is per definition the site of a struggle over what it has been and should be. Massey’s anti-essentialist concept of place rails against the idealism that has always been basic to the bourgeois ideology of place from Romanticism to Heidegger and advertising, and directly implies a radical-democratic politics wherein the future of places remains resolutely open. Abstracting “globalization” from its extremely place-specific nature is another ideological ploy. Refining what Marxists call uneven development and the contradiction between city and country (Smith 2008), Massey defines “power-geometry” (2005: chapter 10) as the topological constellations that systematically benefit a few places and groups by trapping most others in exploitative relationships. The most insidious deception about globalization is that all places are swooped up into it in the same way as if its thickening were unidirectional, convergent, and transparent to everyone involved: a global village. In reality translocal relationships systematically underdevelop some places and overdevelop others. To take an example central to Massey’s activism, the wealth of London’s financial district is linked in myriad ways to poverty in Northern cities. Likewise the hypermobility of capital, diplomats, and businessmen indirectly causes and maintains the flow of refugees to the rich world. Many leftwing academics, Marxists as well as poststructuralists, underestimate the heterogeneity of globalization and the evental nature of place. Clearly capitalism homogenizes landscapes as well as minds. But it requires geographical differentials, barriers, and gradients – intensive differences, as the next chapter will call them – in order to expand at all. The concept of power-geometry can be fruitfully combined with the previous chapter’s nomadological approach to population, capital, and war, which had not yet explicitly told us how cities and landscapes are differentiated as part of the same global system. As the comment above, “the town is the correlate of the road,” evinces, Deleuze and Guattari would generally agree with Massey’s

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stratigraphic ontology of place (indeed, her later work is much indebted to them). The ethical and political corollary of powergeometry is Massey’s concept of “global sense of place,” which stages a two-pronged attack, first on the humanist obsession with roots, heritage, and homeliness, and second on the disavowal of the affective importance of place in various universalisms, including Marxism. This concept explains why many local resistance movements become reactionary especially in the Global North (like environmentalism of the not-in-my-backyard variety), while in others an emancipatory defense of place can occur, often in the Global South (like anti-mining activism or the Zapatistas). Massey’s political involvement in the name of London as “world-city” (2005: 155ff) sought to enhance the progressive aspects of global flows, including ethnic diversity and international solidarity, which could only come together at this place, London. Place therefore continues to have a place in the modern left, against the empty universalism of the Enlightenment and communism for which the particularity of places and identities seems to be an impediment. Deleuze and Guattari strongly agree that the inward-looking and anthropocentric imaginations of humanism and modernity’s steady lamentations about lost place-identity (witness the interior of the British pub, or the role the word community plays in US politics) are based on the wrong ontology. Still, they don’t appear to advocate a “progressive” sense of place. Politically, therefore, they remain closer to Marx than most academics and activists today. Any sense of place, however global, and any politics of place, however cosmopolitan, gives in to humanism and its sedimentary logic. It is true that Deleuze and Guattari accept the strategic necessity of a minimum degree of stratification and territorialization (as do Marx and Lenin). But this is probably not a matter of place as geography understands it. When urban revolutionaries make their guerrilla war-machine, conjure people-to-come, follow lines of flight, and become-nomadic, they grab the world or the earth as such as the site for struggle, not a particular place. When slum-dwellers succeed in reorganizing their food distribution, education, infrastructure, and gender and racial relations through a molecular revolution, insofar as they fight in the name of a place, a right, or a past, they are strictly speaking not Deleuzians. Without explicitly ever avowing a reinvention of the universal, Deleuze and Guattari do advocate for a deterritorialization that

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does not first pass through particularity. The Deleuzian event is not a place in the geographical sense because it is a haecceity, an ongoingness like a verb in the infinitive that cannot be located or named yet is real for that reason. Unlike for Badiou, for Deleuze there seems to be no direct way an event can engender a politics. Nevertheless, when it happens, a molecular revolution as Deleuze and Guattari conceive it is nothing but the obliteration of place into event.

CHAPTER FOUR

Maps Deleuze’s concept of space is to a large extent implicit in his discussions of material and semiotic processes. If we understand space with contemporary geography not as the empty container within which processes would take place but the way those processes themselves are organized, we are able to reconstruct a concept of space running through Deleuze’s entire oeuvre. The processes called globalization are especially pertinent to analyze. There is then an array of pathways from which a Deleuzian geography can be woven, but that could initially appear quite bewildering. This book has discussed a number of these pathways, so that Deleuze can become newly relevant for living through intense times. Our final chapter takes a step back and asks what ontology is needed for a Deleuzian geography worthy of the Anthropocene. In a way, of course, every ontology is spatial, but Deleuze’s revolves around two concepts in particular that are extremely productive for studying space: the virtual and intensity. Intensity is what accompanies the actualization of things from virtual differences, traditionally called potentialities, into the actual differences of spacetime. The virtual has been mentioned a few times but not separately discussed. In Deleuze and Guattari, then, an expansive definition of “cartography” appears in which the virtual lines, contours, and thresholds of abstract machines are what matters more than the simple materiality of assemblages. Deleuze– Guattarian mapping provides entry not to a stable physical reality as Google Maps pretends to do but to continuously changing virtual realities, which per definition largely escape Google. 171

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A book on space cannot omit some brief comments about time, especially given time is Deleuze’s focus much more than space. The relationship of Deleuze to Bergson, his predecessor as philosopher of difference and becoming and also the philosopher of time par excellence, must then also be reassessed.

Intensity Maps are ubiquitous in technocapitalism and have been since the sixteenth century. This chapter will introduce an ontological twist on the procedure of mapping. With Deleuze, mapping becomes a kind of conceptualization, not a scientific practice, going along with the indeterminacy and differences that define the processes of the real world. In Deleuze and Guattari, reality takes place between the extensive and the intensive, between what can and what cannot be identified and measured. A major influence on Deleuze in this chapter is Bergson’s critique of quantification, even if we have seen from the beginning of this book that Deleuze is quite open to the natural sciences (if he wouldn’t be, his relevance to the study of space would definitely be more limited). However, space after Deleuze must be reconceptualized as much more than repetition of quantitative difference. What lies “beneath” the homogeneous and orthogonal spacetime of Newton with its discrete sections and dimensions is another realm, that of virtual multiplicities and continuous difference. Often misunderstood, the concept of virtuality is already basic to human life. It does not have to have anything to do with mysticism.

Virtual Deleuze’s concept of the virtual seems mysterious at first but is in fact almost trivial. As a being moving around, interacting with others and with circumstances, remembering how to do things and planning ahead, you necessarily engage the virtual. When you say, “it could be,” “it seems to be,” “it is likely,” “I can do this,” “I prefer not to,” or “x generally causes y,” you are directly presenting the virtual. There is an old piano. Can it still be tuned? What would its price be? Where was it assembled and how did it get here? Who can

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play it and who wants to? Is this make generally a dependable one? All these aspects of the piano are not directly tangible or measurable. Yet nobody would say they are not real. In fact, the piano wouldn’t be what it is without these kinds of questions or problems. The problems constitute it, they are immanent to it, not add-ons, not merely possible accidents and not incarnations of an eternal Piano essence. In Difference and Repetition, usually considered his magnus opus, Deleuze says such problems are not human impositions upon reality but are latencies of reality, “out there” independently of our minds. The virtual is the name of the realm of everything not physically recognizable in things yet fully real and consequential to them: tendencies, propensities, dispositions, regularities, a thing’s past, its holding-together in the present, all the changes it could undergo, the yet-to-come. “The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual” (DR 208). The seeming tautology in this formula is to affirm virtual is no less real than actual. The virtual forms an essential and irreducible side of reality: “the virtual must be defined as strictly part of the real object” (DR 209). The real object is constituted through an oscillation between its actual and its virtual. When it becomes actualized, an object usurps a region of virtuality that is thereby expanded. Deleuze and Guattari have multiple names for such regions of virtual reality, like map, diagram, lines, abstract machine, rhizome, earth, faciality, and body-without-organs, which have run through this book. The plane of immanence is a term for virtual reality as totality, though as we will see, this Bergsonian– Deleuzian wholeness is controversial. The virtual can be read to structure Bergson’s understanding of time in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, as the manner whereby the past as a whole inhabits the present and the mind and that which makes the passing of the present happen. Bergson does not focus on the concepts of virtuality and intensity, though they are implicit throughout his work. In Difference and Repetition the virtual/actual distinction comes to displace traditional dualities such as potential/actual, possible/real, real/apparent, essence/existence, and form/matter. Most importantly, the virtual is not the possible (Leibniz) or the potential (Aristotle). As Bergson already complained, the possible is but a passive building block of the real (see DR 211). In demography or engineering, for example, a one-to-one

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correspondence is presupposed between the space of possibilities and real space. When the possible is realized, or when potentiality becomes actual, there is no genuine production, only the addition of existence as it was expected beforehand. The actual building is merely its possibility given in its blueprint + its physical execution. Similarly, potentiality is merely the actual laying in wait, merely what will be but isn’t yet: a handicapped reality. For Deleuze it is wrong to think the virtual is less real, and wrong to think actualization is like turning a switch from “potential” to “actual.” The basic illusion in these dominant approaches to the not-yet is that they assume a resemblance between the real and the possible or the actual and the potential. But actualization is the introduction of genuine difference: to the extent that the possible is open to “realization”, it is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. That is why it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like. Such is the defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it. The actualisation of the virtual, on the contrary, always takes place by difference, divergence or differenciation. Actualisation breaks with any resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate. In this sense, actualisation or differenciation is always a genuine creation. DR 212 The Deleuzian virtual lacks nothing and does not resemble its actualization. The virtual of a building, for example, is not just its blueprint, or there wouldn’t be so many unfinished buildings. The building’s virtual is already fully real, but as such it is changing continuously while it communicates with the virtualities of financial speculation, mold, pigeons, and other forces. This continuous self-differentiating of the virtual is what Deleuze writes as differentiation, while the unusual spelling differenciation stands for the spatiotemporal differences effectively being materialized. A fine example of actualization as differenciation through an Idea is learning (see also Bergson 1990: 111). What happens when a

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body learns? It increases its capacities to act and to be affected by its milieu only by literally incorporating a virtual “body” of knowledge, a technique, a grammar. For Deleuze, dancing, swimming, and speaking another language are paradigmatic of all learning because they show a body needs to gradually and literally align itself with an Idea or diagram through repeated movements, largely unconsciously. “To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field” (DR 165). A piano score or yoga instruction is meaningless unless its signs are literally put into practice. Since every dance partner, speaking situation, or wave of the sea is different, there is a slight deflection (differentiation) of the technique or grammar necessary for the learning to take place. On an ethical level such examples show that in true learning the body exposes itself to ridicule, even to death. The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping the former in practice as signs. That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns: there is an innate or acquired practical familiarity with signs, which means that there is something amorous – but also something fatal – about all education. DR 23 Or again: Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element, which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheardof world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? DR 192 Swimming is making a map with one’s body of the water through which one swims. Any thing has its actual side in physical spacetime and a virtual realm of tendencies or instructions that cascade into

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the actual. These in-structions (struere, to heap up, from ProtoIndo-European root *stere, to stretch out) are the immediate conditions of the thing, that by which it moves and changes. What the previous chapter and physics call event is simply the passage from virtual to actual, in which the virtual is not exhausted. Spacetime is fundamentally structured by hinge-points that are unique to themselves. Deleuze calls these singularities after geometry (the places where functions take on infinite value and are thereby exploded) and physics (the places where gravity or density becomes infinite, that is, black holes). Thanks to the absolute nonresemblance among singularities, the belief that science could ever completely measure reality and formalize the virtual is from the start erroneous and ideological. Humans are capable of capturing but a vanishingly slight approximation of any virtual structure. But no more is needed. On Deleuze’s metaphysics, coming close in this respect to pragmatist philosophy, success in engineering, climate modeling, artistic training, political strategizing, and yoga instruction show the intellect does indeed come to directly seize the virtual. Because virtual space is continually stirred by physical spacetime, its singularities or images cannot be point-like and distributed evenly. Deleuze puts great emphasis on the fundamentally unequal nature of the virtual and the intensive. Before a storm there are electric charges, gradients of condensation, tensions, torsions, or most simply disparities. “We call this state of infinitely doubled difference which resonates to infinity disparity. Disparity – in other words, difference or intensity (difference of intensity) – is the sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears” (DR 222). These disparities or virtual differences form the “dark precursor” to the storm that determine and will fully explain the storm, or its “quasi-cause” (see LS 14th series). But the subatomic and energetic movements constituting these disparities are themselves explained by their quantum background (background), by dark energy and a residual directionality from the Big Bang. Any event implies an infinite series of disparities coming singularly together here and now. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze writes that an event is an affirmation of incalculable chance, a dicethrow affecting the entire system of virtual problems: “The dice are thrown against the sky, with all the force of displacement of the aleatory point, with their imperative points like lightning, forming ideal problem-constellations in the sky. They fall back to Earth with

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all the force of the victorious solutions which bring back the throw” (DR 284). Hence when Difference and Repetition uses the traditional term “Idea” for the virtual multiplicity of tendencies it is retrofitting Plato’s unchanging, self-enclosed, perfect essence to denote messy virtualities immanent to the earth. An Idea inhabits the interstices of the system it shapes and it communicates with all others, whether “closely” (clearly) or “remotely” (obscurely). When a piano is being played its Idea is actualized in a way specific to its conjunction with the Ideas of the body playing it, the other bodies and instruments, the night-time economy and racial formation they are part of, pianos in general, and so on, in ever wider circuits and ever deeper layers of causality. The “and so on” does not have to detract us from a rigorous examination of the reality of Ideas as they are progressively concentrated. The virtuality or tendencies of a piano are given not only with its position in an economy and a music culture but with the biophysical and geochemical history of its materials, that is, what Chapter  1 called a machinic phylum. Obviously, if its entire past and everything that could happen to a piano make up its virtual reality, this reality is ultimately the flip side of the cosmos. This is the impetus for Bergson, but it makes many uncomfortable. Badiou gives the strongest arguments available to support the suspicion many newcomers have that Deleuze too forsakes the materialist and critical positions. For Badiou (1999: 47ff), Deleuze makes ontology and ethics depend not only on an inscrutable concept of the chaotic virtual but a quasi-mystical primordial unity underlying all nature or life. Even if the example of piano-playing shows there is an ethnomethodological explanation of virtuality that eschews spiritual discourses, there can be a nagging sense that what really matters is not matter or space but how things slide towards the allencompassing Virtuality as the cosmic principle of differentiation. We have seen before why the Deleuze–Badiou debate is the most important one for materialist ontology today. A key line of defense for Deleuze is that the virtual is nothing without the bodies and milieus that actualize it. Deleuzian Ideas do not subsist in a transcendent reality independent from their actualization, even if the overall virtual edge of a system continues to autonomously propel it forward. There are no grammars or laws that don’t change. The “essence” of what a piano is continuously develops (differentiates) because it is incarnated in changing genres,

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political economies, and technospheres. In Proust and Signs Deleuze deliberately follows the novelist’s use of the term “essence” to turn it into something situational and historical (PS 39ff). But the language of essence reeks of mysticism. The best defense against Badiou’s charge might be that a concept of virtuality is indispensable for the sciences even though it is seldom acknowledged as such. Difference and Repetition focuses especially on thermodynamics, geometry, and developmental biology. When mathematics works with manifolds and probability space, physics with phase space, biology with fitness landscapes and phylogenetic trees (with “branches” like Mammalia and so on), linguists with syntax, psychoanalysis with positions and poles, they are all drawing maps of virtual space. Art is likewise an actualization of virtual differences: painting has its palette (FB 144ff), music its tonal and harmonic space (ATP 94), literature its “system of signs” (PS 84ff). Politics could likewise be rethought as a virtual cartography of historical hopes, names, and events like “communism” and “May 1968” (as Badiou, Negri, and Guattari already do in various ways), as well as of changing tactics and strategies. Now where is a palette? Where is the fitness landscape of a genotype? (Indeed, where is a genotype?) Most biologists would say a fitness landscape (a three-dimensional visualization of reproductive success plotted against genotypes) exists independently of their minds, yet they directly access it in and through their discourse. Most philosophers of science would say “landscape” is but a convenient metaphor that has worked sufficiently well so far. Deleuze would largely side with the biologists – that is, he tends towards epistemological realism, as Manuel DeLanda (2002) most influentially argues – but he emphasizes at the same time that dogmas, prejudices, and biases are bound to make scientific practice distort virtual structures. We cannot enter the age-old debate about representation and reality here, however important it is for the conceptualization of space (see for example Massey 2005: 20–30). Suffice to say Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” (DR 143–44) is strongly opposed to the representationalism that became dominant in the 1990s in cultural studies, deconstruction, and cultural geography (see Anderson et  al. 2012). He agrees with empiricism that things directly impinge on our senses and our thinking, but he also agrees with German idealism that a transcendental structure of our mind conditions the manner of how things impact it.

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Of any body, therefore, there can only be development into an organized whole-with-parts (differenciation) because of an infinite regress of strata, ever-expanding circuits of oscillations, and zones of indiscernibility between an infinity of virtuals and actuals. At the level of global history the classic example of differenciation and virtual– actual oscillation is, of course, uneven development (Smith 2008). As we have seen, capital is the most deterritorialized flow and is, as such, the main vector in the basic virtual diagram of globalization the last three centuries or so. Actual flows of capital feedback into ever steeper and more complex gradients of purchasing power, which in turn condition the emergence of migrations, cities, famine, riots, and so on. Though structured around nodes like Frankfurt and Singapore and black holes like Kivu, Phnom Penh, and Liechtenstein, and therefore precipitated by mappable inequalities, capital’s virtuality is eminently abyssal. Capital could be called the “most virtual” body of the known universe precisely because it enrolls infrastructural, evolutionary, affective, and geophysical strata well beneath and alongside those of finance, and of knowing per se. But transcendental empiricism holds that the abstract machines of all these formations can be known enough to be dismantled, insofar as they are already practiced. In the final analysis, against Badiou’s charge, the concept of virtuality seems better suited for science and politics than it is for religion.

Difference Difference and Repetition critiques Western philosophy’s forgetting of difference in a similar way to how Heidegger does for being. It seeks “a world without identity, without resemblance or equality [,] a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity)” (DR 241). The book gains much methodologically from Bergson’s critique of quantitative and mechanistic thinking yet also builds on the differential calculus and developmental biology. However, Difference and Repetition also has important Kantian, Humean, Nietzschean, Spinozian, Freudian, and Leibnizian borrowings, and these are ultimately what allow reading it for an ontology that does not repeat Bergson’s mistaken critique of space. In fact it can in its entirety be read as a theorization of how what is usually called

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“space” with its actual differences (things, places, and trends with their properties and qualities) is a condensation of a virtual realm of an entirely different kind of differences. The central provocation Deleuze finds in Bergson’s philosophy is to think difference not as from something else, not as relational, and especially not as negatively defined by what it is not (DI 32–51). As Deleuze writes in an early essay on Bergsonian difference: “It is not things, nor the states of things, nor is it characteristics, that differ in nature; it is tendencies” (DI 34). Tendencies come before things and before causes and each tendency is absolute onto itself. Difference has to be rethought as internal and self-propelling, an irruption or activity, a differing from itself, in short, as change. Deleuze’s farreaching critique of identity has a wide range of applications, as his work with Guattari shows. The concept of difference-in-itself can be productively applied to critique both essentializing conceptions of place, heritage, community, and the rational individual and illegitimate generalizations from all-too-particular experience like that of white bourgeois men. As we saw in the previous chapter, all claims to identity and the past under capitalism are bound with territorializations in the form of segments, faces, and landscapes. Foregrounding difference before identity metaphysically therefore prepares for a critical geography at the empirical level. Bergson is important for defining difference as what requires intensity. Reviving debates in scholasticism and Kant (1999: 286ff) about intensive and extensive magnitudes, Bergson (1913) critiques modern philosophy for reducing reality to differences in degree, that is, to what is divisible without changing nature. What should become capable of being thought is instead the infinite differences in kind, qualitative differences, differences that are incomparable and indivisible. Positivism and utilitarianism are Bergson’s key antagonists. Propagating themselves on the basis of the hegemony of science, these philosophies think they can make all differences measurable, comparable, and generalizable on the same plane. But science cannot seriously consider the differences in nature amongst the processes it formalizes, or it wouldn’t work at all. In fact Bergson says human brains are themselves hardwired to think difference as quantitative and utilitarian. The task of metaphysics is to prove this hardwiring is not destiny. Hence differences in degree do exist for Bergson but they necessarily correspond to increases or decreases of intensity within

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the objects involved in encountering or embodying them. Turning up the heat in a room will increase the room’s intensity. While heat, volume, and electricity are extensive parameters divisible and addable without changing their nature, temperature is an intensive magnitude and particular to the system it inhabits. An intensive magnitude will change nature when divided. Split a current of 1500 watts and you get two currents of 750 watts. But split a room at 20 degrees centigrade in half and you won’t have two rooms at 10 degrees but a different state of affairs altogether. Speed is also an intensive magnitude, inseparable from its embodiment. While two currents at 750 watts have the same energy total as one of 1500, two bodies moving at 100 kilometers an hour are something entirely different from one moving at 200. Hence “speed total” is an absurd category. Bergson criticizes the traditional notion of intensity because it takes magnitude as hallmark for difference. He gives the example (1913: 45–46) of pitch in music. Because of the muscular effort and postures of the body (thorax, ears), the convention arose to call some notes “higher” and “lower” than others and to represent pitch on a vertical scale. Physics confirmed the linear notion of musical scale by measuring vibrations. Pitch is spatialized, as if an F# is “more” intense because it is “higher” than the C “below” it. This is understandable but only half the story. In reality every vibratory interaction between body and sound is a section through an n-dimensional space (not range) of qualitative differences. Each pitch or rhythm is its own kind of intensity, a pure multiplicity or singularity that does not behave like number and scale do. All conceptions of intensity (pressure, temperature, etc.) as magnitudes on a scale distort what sensation is. Intensity is pure variation that is always homogenized in representation. What is fascinating is that Bergson (1913) calls the realm of quantitative differences “space,” and that of continuous infinite movement “duration.” Duration or time is for Bergson that which has been “forgotten” in Heidegger’s sense. The lived temporality that is music is a favorite post-Bergsonian example of the metaphysical truth that deep down body, brain, and life as such are not juxtaposed to time. The ceaseless flow of reality is thought to be done grave epistemic violence by measuring it in discrete units and representing it on a page. Differences of degree are extensive in the scholastic (and Spinozian) sense. They are laid out over a plane that

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stays the same. For Bergson, taking Galileo and Newton at their word, thinking spatially is thinking quantitatively. For him, space, both the concept and the reality, is nothing but the universal tendency towards stasis and homogeneity. We will return to Bergson’s identification of space and stasis in the last sections of this book. Deleuze is heavily influenced by Bergson’s concept of a generative Time, which is immanent to but independent from the spatial constellation it directs. He repeats Bergson’s example of a dissolving sugar cube (B 31–32). There is a spatial configuration of molecules gradually dissipating into water. The constellation exhibits differences of degree between sugar and water, like atomic mass, velocity, and direction of movement. The time the sugar takes to dissolve can be measured. But there is also a temporal process that cannot be divided into units, a continuous variation encompassing the impatience of the observer, the acts of being seated and looking, as well as the many other rhythms s/he lives. Each of these components is a difference in kind and is involved in the experiment in its own way. One reason Deleuzian difference cannot be easily accused of being esoteric or irrationalist is that a second major inspiration for thinking intensity is very un-Bergsonian, namely differential calculus. Mathematics might not automatically avoid the temptations of vitalism and the possibly fallacious extrapolation from the brain to physical reality, but with calculus, Deleuze does make a choice that can be strategically developed. Without calculus there would be no modern physics and bourgeois economics. For Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism it isn’t finding differential equations in reality that matters, of course, but how mathematicians think difference. The calculus was developed by Leibniz and Newton independently to deal with some deadlocks in algebra and the difficulty of calculating continuous variation, requiring new and immanent conceptions of infinity and nothingness. “Differentiation” is the mathematical operation whereby one determines the change in the gradients along a curve, or how the curve’s tangent shifts at every point, dividing the curve into the infinite changes that compose it. “Integration” is the reverse procedure in calculus, in which one reconstructs a figure from infinitely small curvatures. Calculus succeeds in understanding a gradient dynamically, as a limit and always already vanishing. Leibniz calls “infinitesimal”

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such a difference tending to but never reaching zero. The differential of the graph is nothing but its tendency, which is already an interaction, the interaction between the variables plotted on the xand y-axes. A differential, which Leibniz writes dy/dx, can be said to describe change in itself. The variables are varying in strict tandem, they “reciprocally determine” each other (DR 46), or there would be no axes or graph to plot at all. Differential is nothing but the mathematical term for the non-actualized differences we have been explicating in this chapter, and Deleuze makes of dx the symbol of a philosophy of difference instead of the A and not-A in Aristotle or Hegel (DR 170). He adds that every differential, every gradient or unevenness, is explained by others. Unlike Bergson, who thinks intensity’s quantitative dimension disqualifies it as the basis of time, Deleuze says that it is precisely the quantitative, differential, dynamic, and as we have seen disparate aspects of a system that makes it change: “the Bergsonian critique of intensity seems unconvincing” (DR 239). Every intensity is differential, by itself a difference. Every intensity is E – E’, where E itself refers to an e – e’ and e to ε – ε’ etc.: each intensity is already a coupling (in which each element of the couple refers in turn to couples of elements of another order), thereby revealing the properly qualitative content of quantity. We call this state of infinitely doubled difference which resonates to infinity disparity. Disparity – in other words, difference or intensity (difference of intensity) – is the sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears. DR 222 The intensity between two consecutive piano notes “refers to” the intensity between two vibrating strings, which “refers to” the intensity of the pressure of fingers on the keys, which refers to the intensity of the player’s mood, and so on to infinity. There is always already a stratification of intensities or disparities which one would not know of if one stays on the level of calculus. Calculus provides a powerful notion of difference as intensity and as positive differentiation. Deleuze in effect invites us to claim it against the hegemonic uses of it in economics, medicine, and so on. But mathematics is much more than calculus and topology. Badiou (1999: 90–91) undeniably has a point in criticizing Deleuze

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for not engaging Cantor’s set theory. A more systematic and updated reconstruction of Deleuze-inflected mathematics would have to include set theory, the incompleteness theorem in logic, and their revolutionizing impact on philosophy. Such an exploration would extend Deleuze’s brief forays into mathematics to think difference against the essentialism and positivism of science. What makes Deleuze’s contribution original, and where Badiou refuses to follow him, is that differentiation qua material process necessarily occurs on two levels, the virtual and the actual. Differentiation is the process whereby virtual differences gradually become defined as they intersect with others and become different in each incarnation, each repetition. For the actualization of an Idea into the physical differences we call organs, things, individuals, species, genera, and so on, Deleuze writes differenciation, extrapolating from the French term for cell differentiation. Hence to write differenc/tiation is to name the cusp where actual space emerges from virtual reality. It can be said to condense Deleuze’s overall metaphysical project. When a piano solo materializes, there is a continuous tipping over from virtual into actual. The player and piano actively select from and travel through the Ideal spaces of timbre, beat, pitch, scale, harmony, tempo, and so on. But there is simultaneously a movement from actual to virtual, a movement Badiou deliberately omits in his criticism of Deleuze. With every solo, the essence of piano, as well as what is possible on this piano with this player, is slightly altered. When we talk of an innovative technique we simply mean a noticeable and desirable jump in differentiation. Habitually a piano’s virtual multiplicity differentiates at exactly the rate it allows the piano to continue existing as a territorialization of wood, string, sound, and affect. The piano is held together by refrains and practicing. But once in a while there is a significant deterritorialization. The piano-Idea “expands” its field of tendencies and “more” has become possible from now on. Such an event or leap in differentiation is where Deleuze’s ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics merge.

Egg We are now in a position to think space as material differences distributed unevenly, interpenetrating at various scales and determined by changing virtual dimensions. It helps to understand

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Deleuzian Ideas are problems that demand solutions by the material system they inhabit but are never fully answered. Problems are changed a little every time they are solved. “The virtual possess the reality of a task to be performed or a problem to be solved: it is the problem which orientates, conditions and engenders solutions, but these do not resemble the conditions of the problem” (DR 212). Problems are not simply constraints but “spaces of possibility” with n dimensions, where n is the number of parameters (DR 182; DeLanda 2002). For example, the tick’s problem-space has three dimensions: how to smell, how to jump, how to suck blood (cf. SPP 124–25). Evolutionary biology too sees life as a series of responses to problematic fields at many scales. To take Darwin’s famous example (2009: 172ff), the eye is the imperfect solution to the problems of light and movement (cf. DR 211). Life’s problems don’t ever disappear with one solution, of course. Evolution is ongoing. Ideas are far from inert doubles of systems but mobile across systems. What seems to interest Deleuze more than Darwinian evolution is morphogenesis, the process whereby things like organisms and landforms obtain their shape and structure. The development of an individual happens thanks to diagrams evolved over millions of years. How does genetic code turn into a physical body? There is no resemblance whatsoever between the C, G, A, and T nucleobases of the genetic code and the actual bodily result. Developmental biology shows that real intensities must be sought “beneath” the distributions of matter into parts (organs) and wholes (individuals). The embryo actualizes from an intensive “space,” which itself “grows” according to how the embryo’s environment triggers its genetic program (hence birth defects in radioactive environments). What Deleuze calls the “field of individuation” transpires always between instructions of various orders (DR 247ff). The resultant individuals then reassemble into what systematics identifies as kingdoms, genera, species, and so on. But Linnaean taxonomy confuses species with the fields of individuation, and thereby remains tethered to the premodern essentialism of Aristotle. At this point Deleuze calls diagrams for development spatiotemporal dynamisms. “Beneath the actual qualities and extensities, species and parts, there are spatio-temporal dynamisms. These are the actualising, differenciating agencies” (DR 214). Every virtual multiplicity or Idea is a program of instructions for creating physical spatiality and temporality, but one that cannot sit still: “the

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dynamisms are no less temporal than spatial. They constitute a time of actualisation or differenciation no less than they outline spaces of actualisation. Not only do these spaces begin to incarnate differential relations between elements of the reciprocally and completely determined structure, but the times of differenciation incarnate the time of the structure, the time of progressive determination” (217). A fertilized egg or embryo is a slice of spacetime containing a dense unfolding of an intensive order particular to it. “Embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them” (118). A growing individual is an environment of biochemical intensities triggering each other according to the timeworn schemas characterizing living matter. “Types of egg are therefore distinguished by the orientations, the axes of development, the differential speeds and rhythms which are the primary factors in the actualisation of a structure and create a space and a time peculiar to that which is actualized” (214). But differentials, as we saw, refer ad infinitum to more differentials. Spatiotemporal dynamisms are like virtual superstrata that differentiate ultimately according to the deepest and most robust substrata of virtual multiplicities we call the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. But Deleuze prefers eggs. Their kind of individuation is exemplarily milieudependent, evolutive, and, as we will see, implicative. In describing bodies through differenc/tiation, embryology as no other science shows what spacetime is fundamentally about. “The entire world is an egg” (216, see also ATP 164). The evolution of a genetic program cannot be understood outside the interactions amongst populations in ecosystems. The spatiotemporal dynamism, the agency responsible for actualizing an egg, is not the genetic code, but the polyrhythmic interplay of the genetic code with the egg’s multiscalar milieus. While neo-Darwinian reductionist dogma holds that evolution through natural selection (differenciation into actual species and kingdoms) occurs solely through the random mutation of genes, Deleuze sees a much larger scope of action for development in philosophy. We saw in Chapter  2 how Deleuzian ontology thinks population and scale against essentialism. For example, population flow always already disturbs bioregions. Darwin (2009: chapters 11 and 12) himself emphatically argues that variability in populations and speciation events only come about through the sedimentation into hereditary

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lines of what he calls “geographical variation.” Deleuze likewise notes: A living being is not only defined genetically, by the dynamisms which determine its internal milieu, but also ecologically, by the external movements which preside over its distribution within an extensity. A kinetics of population adjoins, without resembling the kinetics of the egg; a geographic process of isolation may be no less formative of species than internal genetic variations, and sometimes precedes the latter. DR 216–17 The ontology of Difference and Repetition presages biology’s turns towards systems, symbiosis, and epigenesis. And yet it does not reduce all systems to the same laws of distribution as much complexity theory tends to do (cf. DeLanda 2002). For Deleuze there is no resemblance between what goes on at the scales of embryonic development and at those of movement ecology and world-history. Phylogeny (evolution) and ontogeny (development) are both problems of how the elements of a multiplicity emerge, move, and interlace, but the differences constituting their virtual Ideas are differences in kind. That the world is an egg means the egg is a world. But a planet, crystal, or city is a world too. It is not that all systems are “like” eggs, but that the egg contains a spatiotemporal dynamism that is a particularly intense differentiated product of the universe’s general tendency to complexity. When Deleuze provides his summary of intensity in Difference and Repetition he says it has three characteristics. First, as we saw in the previous section, intensity is a quantitative difference, a difference of degree, a disparity, “the quality that belongs to quantity,” which directly makes of number a vector capable of effecting change (DR 232). Second, an intensity always “affirms” itself in that it “wants to” produce ever more difference exactly like a chain reaction. “Since intensity is already difference, it refers to a series of other differences that it affirms by affirming itself” (234). This unavoidable self-affirmativeness of difference means negativity, zero, and not-A are derivative differences. “Qualitative contrariety is only the reflection of the intense, a reflection which betrays it by explicating it in extensity” (236). And third, intensity is also implication. When we say something is intense, we mean it

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encompasses “an implicated, enveloped or ‘embryonised’ quantity” (237). The language of implication and envelopment leads to the concept of folding in our next section. For now it bears stating that an organism’s development (cell differentiation) is an envelopment of intensive quantitative differences that cannot be divided and that disappears in extensive matter. “Difference in the form of intensity remains implicated in itself, while it is cancelled by being explicated in extensity” (228). Actualization or differenciation is the same as extension, which is the same as explication, the unfolding of infinitely folded intensities. Again following Bergson, extensity is the Deleuzian name of physical or external space as ongoing product and absorption of inner difference. The intensity of a red, for example, is independent from how it is explicated in a context: “the internal space of a colour is not to be confused with the manner in which it occupies an extensity where it enters into relations with other colours” (DR 216). The epistemological problem is that “we know intensity only as already developed within an extensity, and as covered over by qualities” (223). The space of physical matter and energy is a blanket annulling a “deeper” kind of space. Deleuze calls intensity depth, a depth before any measurement or dimensionality, precisely the groundlessness or universal ungrounding that Chapter 1 started with (229–30). Once more he uses a geographical metaphor to emphasize the volatile and ruptural nature of intensive space: “Depth is like the famous geological line from NE to SW, the line which comes diagonally from the heart of things and distributes volcanoes: it unites a bubbling sensibility and a thought which ‘thunders in its crater’ ” (230, quoting “The Internationale”, trans. mod.). If we can say geophilosophy probes into the depth of things, we mean it sketches the violent maps of intensities that are literally replaced by the actual bodies, places, and flows we know. Summarizing the folding interaction between intensity and extensity, the conclusion of Difference and Repetition uses four terms with pli (fold) as its basis. “Perplication” is the mutual entanglement of Ideas or virtual problems. “Complication” is what we call the system’s complexity (DR 252), the chaos that “affirms the divergence” of the intensive series that forms a system’s problematic diagram (280). “Implication” is the most important, since it refers to the movement from intensive to extensive, and since “all the intensities are implicated in one another, each in turn

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both enveloped and enveloping, such that each continues to express the changing totality of Ideas, the variable ensemble of differential relations” (252). “Explication,” finally, is what we call the actualized system itself with its identifiable extensive characteristics (281). These four figures of folding mean that the organism or self is more like a fractal than a delineated entity. “Individuation is mobile, strangely supple, fortuitous and endowed with fringes and margins; all because the intensities which contribute to it communicate with one each other, envelop other intensities and are in turn enveloped. The individual is far from indivisible, never ceasing to divide and change its nature” (257). We will shortly return to folding, but we can see the post-Kantian subject becomes on Deleuze’s rereading a smudged and larval being, whose ongoingness depends on enveloping the milieus it finds itself in.

Cartographies As we have hinted a few times, Deleuze is not opposed to structuralism. In the 1960s he shared with Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan an anti-phenomenological impetus to think reality as the play of differential forces that consciousness only poorly grasps. “The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them. The reality of the virtual is structure” (DR 209). When we talk of the “structure” of kinship, a film, or the division of labor, we are trying to map the differences of a virtual space. As we saw with faciality, to live in capitalist society is to be unconsciously assigned a position in its structure, a spatial process often called positionality. And all of a society’s positionalities coexist somewhere, or more accurately, they co-subsist. They determine each other as a series, or a grid, a rigid segmentarity. In his sympathetic essay on structuralism Deleuze writes: It is not a matter of a location in a real spatial expanse, nor of sites in imaginary extensions, but rather of places and sites in a properly structural space, that is, a topological space. Space is what is structural, but an unextended, pre-extensive space, pure spatium constituted bit by bit as an order of proximity, in which the notion of proximity first of all has precisely an ordinal sense

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and not a signification in extension. [. . .] When Foucault defines determinations such as death, desire, work, or play, he does not consider them as dimensions of empirical human existence, but above all as the qualifications of places and positions which will render those who come to occupy them mortal and dying, or desiring, or workman-like, or playful. These, however, only come to occupy the places and positions secondarily, fulfilling their roles according to an order of proximity that is an order of the structure itself. TRM 174 But while structuralism correctly seeks to describe the general differences a particular case incarnates, it falls into an idealist or empiricist trap when it doesn’t think through how these differences are already changing as they intermesh. Structuralism’s theory of proximities and relations – its topology – is too static and ahistorical. What Deleuze and Guattari attempted in Anti-Oedipus is precisely to radicalize the antihumanist drift of structuralism in anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism by understanding virtual space as driven by desire and disruption. A key idea of structuralism, which Foucault and Althusser elaborated and Deleuze and Guattari can be said to have perfected, is that of the topology of power. Whereas traditional theories both bourgeois and Marxist locate power within actors as something they materially possess, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977) famously reconceptualizes power as an assemblage or field encompassing and enabling the actors or groups of actors that thereby constitute power relations. In the chapter “A New Cartographer” in Foucault, Deleuze writes that his friend invented “a new topology which no longer locates the origin of power in a privileged place, and can no longer accept a limited localization,” suggesting Foucault’s theory of the nonlocal puts him in conversation with contemporary mathematics and physics (F 26). Power relations are “virtual, potential, unstable, vanishing and molecular” (37). Every kind of social field or apparatus has its own dispositif (usually translated “apparatus”) or diagram, synonyms for Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract machine we have discussed before. Diagram is not exactly structure, because it is the intense double of the extensive social field itself. Unlike structure, a diagram is “highly unstable or fluid, continually churning matter and functions in a way likely to

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create change” (35). Discipline and Punish departs from structuralism by emphasizing the nonlocatability and historicity of the apparatuses or dispositifs of power. Deleuze furthermore argues that Discipline and Punish only makes sense against the background of the attempts at revolution in 1968 (F 44). Foucault’s cartography provides “new co-ordinates for praxis. In the background a battle begins to brew, with its local tactics and overall strategies which advance not by totalizing but by relaying, connecting, converging and prolonging. The question ultimately is: What is to be done?” (F 30). If Deleuze poses Lenin’s question anew here it is because Foucault demonstrates revolutionary subjectivity cannot be centralized in a party or state bureaucracy. As we saw in Chapter 2, however, Deleuze and Guattari disagree with Foucault’s deep suspicion of the category of desire (DI 106ff). Even if Foucault is sympathetic to revolution, his diagrammatics of power does not provide conceptual directions for changing reality. In contrast, for Deleuze and Guattari, cartography is intrinsically transposable towards revolutionary practice, whether in art, science, history, therapy, or metaphysics. Deleuze’s new conception of mapping is closely linked to his Spinozian conception of the body and neoscholastic conception of the event, which I discussed in Chapter  3. It also retrieves the ontology of speeds of Chapter 2. We saw that for Spinoza, a body – a piano, peanut, or prelude – is always already exchanging affects with the spaces in which it moves. The ethologist Uexküll is a closet Spinozist, according to Deleuze, insofar as he grasps how what a body can do depends strongly on how it controls its changing environment (SPP 126). An ecosystem is nothing but a virtual symphony of bodies of many species getting in and out of tune with one another. In short, if we are Spinozists we will not define a thing by its form, nor by its organs and its functions, nor as a substance or a subject. Borrowing terms from the Middle Ages, or from geography, we will define it by longitude and latitude. [. . .] We call longitude of a body the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that compose it from this point of view, that is, between unformed elements. We call latitude the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous force (force for

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existing, capacity for being affected). In this way we construct the map of a body. The longitudes and latitudes together constitute Nature, the plane of immanence or consistency, which is always variable and is constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities. SPP 127–28 Let us unpack this excerpt. In Deleuze’s qualitative and nonvisual “map” of a body, longitude will be that body’s manner of holding itself together. What makes a jam session consistent is the set of transversal connections amongst the vibrations of the notes, players, (imagined) audience, and so on. This consistency belongs to none of the individual components themselves, but emerges from their interaction. Each component is furthermore composed of an infinity of smaller particles. The specificity of the assemblage of a jam session derives only from its specific kind of vibrating, its “speed and slowness.” In contrast, latitude will be what this section has been theorizing as intensive difference, that which propels a thing or body to act and change. It is composed of the differentials between the body and its context. Latitude names the ecological sense of place built into the French word milieu: between-place. Qua intensity, the betweenness of place is problematic. For example, the differentiality between a jam session and the overall conjuncture of jazz leads to the question (problem), what of that conjuncture does this jam session incorporate and how will it in turn affect that conjuncture? What is a solo capable of? Deleuze says this capacity is an “anonymous force” because he wants to avoid returning to a model wherein consistency and change depend on intention or rational utility. Though it seems Deleuze argues there can be a thinking of the “plane of immanence” as totality of what is mappable, his subtle but crucial criticism of Spinoza and all pre-Kantian philosophy is that there is no one ultimate Substance or transcendent principle that would preexist and hold together all things and cause them to change. As the virtual side of things, Nature-or-God is simply the name for their perpetual becoming through composition and intensity. Like a pianist changes jazz itself, collectivities change nature itself. We can see how Deleuze’s revolutionary politics can be read into his metaphysics of the non-One. As we saw previously, Badiou (1999) might be right that Deleuze does not sufficiently

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break with the mysticism and pantheism of the tradition of immanentist theology to the extent that his metaphysics remains pre-Cantorian. Still, if we keep to a rigorous realism of the porous virtual and insist against Spinoza that there is no substantial whole to Deleuzian space but only a formal universal propensity to difference, the revolutionary potentialities of thought’s circumstances can be mapped with precision. The fullest development of Deleuzian cartography is probably the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus called “Rhizome.” The hegemonic way of mapping or diagramming reality is through a representationalist epistemology based on resemblance and reproducibility. Tree-diagrams and organization charts are the classic examples of representation attempting to enforce an arborescence onto the virtual. Cartography in the narrow sense is dominant under capitalism precisely because it claims to make all space knowable and equivalent. GPS traces the road network. It only works when the latter remains constant and is read in a certain way, which requires a certain competence coded masculine. Such representation is what Deleuze and Guattari call tracing. What they call a map, in contrast, is freed from the false illusion that it can resemble the virtual and that there is only one way of reading. “A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’” (ATP 12–13). There is creativity involved in Deleuze–Guattarian cartography because it understands that the compositions and intensities of what it maps continuously change as the mapping proceeds. Of course, many contemporary geographers now admit that maps in the narrow sense have always had performative and ideological dimensions. The explosion of cartographies under technocapitalism today shows representations of space are varying mixtures of tracing (utility, profit, ideology) and mapping (art, politics, philosophy) in Deleuze’s sense. In his book on the expressionist painter Francis Bacon, Deleuze further develops the creative and affective dimensions of the map or diagram (the terms seem interchangeable). After a period of learning in which the body must incarnate instructions the creative act consists in changing those instructions themselves, particularly in modern art. There is a differentiation when the essence of painting or of a school is modified unpredictably and incalculably: who could foresee expressionism in the late nineteenth century even if in

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hindsight its beginnings were there? Deleuze starts his chapter on the diagram by arguing that there is a field of intensities “on” the canvas as real as the painting that is its materialization. Instead of the painter’s intentions or biography it is this field or map that is the true agent of the event of painting. To create is exhausting and so often catastrophic for the artist because the forces to contend with are immense, as if s/he is withstanding the violent intensities of an egg. They say that the painter is already in the canvas, where he or she encounters all the figurative and probabilistic givens that occupy or preoccupy the canvas. An entire battle takes place on the canvas between the painter and the givens. There is thus a preparatory work that belongs to painting fully, and yet precedes the act of painting. This preparatory work can be done in sketches, though it need not be, and in any case sketches do not replace it (like many contemporary painters, Bacon does not make sketches). This preparatory work is invisible and silent, yet extremely intense, and the act of painting itself appears as an afterward, an après-coup (‘hysteresis’) in relation to this work. FB 99 Most see horror and anguish in Bacon’s paintings. They are beautiful for Deleuze because in demonstrating the catastrophic nature of the body-without-organs, they affirm a higher, more difficult joy. In this way all art should be appreciated as Deleuzian cartography, as the nonrepresentational drawing of the intensities structuring the world from which the artist makes a selection relevant to an ethicoaesthetic and geohistorical present. While maps in the usual Euclidian sense are flat, rigidly segmentarized, and facialized like the landscapes and projects they represent, cartography after Deleuze and Guattari becomes nonrepresentational, a corporeal and critical practice. Instead of a representation with a fixed scale, catalogue number, and predetermined use, a Deleuzian map must participate in reality just like the events calling for themselves to be mapped. “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall,

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conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation” (ATP 2). Deleuzian cartography manages to make present the virtual reality of a real place or process not because it resembles that reality or “corresponds” to it in an agreed-upon conventional way but because it enfolds the same basic tendencies as the conjured place or process. It was Guattari who seems to have first suggested there are many cartographies, and that theory must be cartographical because reality itself is ordered and altered through lines, machines, and fluxes. The wildest ever expansion of what it means to map is no doubt Schizoanalytic Cartographies, wherein Guattari unleashes a veritable avalanche of formalizations, to be done forever, it would seem, with the Lacanian matheme that haunts him. For most readers Guattari’s theoretical promiscuity at this point descends (or ascends) too far into obscurantism to be of much use. Maybe, however, we needed such an extreme position in the theoretical field to be reminded just how much mapping has to negotiate its own lines of abolition and black holes of positivist redundancy. Technocapitalism should have no monopoly on what a map can do.

Folding When Jackson Pollock paints what is already “on” the canvas, when a flow of money follows a gradient, where exactly should we locate the change taking place? How does the diagram of an animal’s affects become enfleshed? How exactly should we picture the motion from the virtual field of propensities into the actual situation that emerges in it? Is the actual object or is its virtual double the agent? These are difficult questions but crucial to signpost for further research into Deleuze’s ontological cartography.

Expressionism One reason Deleuze introduces the concept of folding is to recast the dualism intrinsic to the actual-virtual couple, a dualism he fully acknowledges while writing about Bergson (B 21ff), who had in turn reworked the mind/body problem that has beleaguered

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philosophy at least since Descartes. Given this immense metaphysical baggage it should not come as a surprise that the fold remains perhaps the most obscure in Deleuze’s arsenal. Yet it may also be the most important concept for a fully materialist and critical conception of space. In fact, returning to the question what type of philosopher Deleuze is with which my introduction started, it is possible to locate the greatest novelty of Deleuze’s system in his concept of the fold, or folding. This book has treated Deleuze as a materialist thinker quite close to the concerns of geography and other social and physical sciences. Nevertheless, traversing his materialism is from the beginning a call to engage with concepts traditionally dear to idealism and to art, like sensation, image, fiction, signs, paradox, affect, madness, desire, world-history, style, and ideas themselves. Basically, after Deleuze we can say space is materiality, but only because it contains an “outside,” an asubjective ideality structuring it from within. The previous section showed that the crucial improvement on materialism Deleuze introduces to beat idealism on its own turf is the virtual. But he has even less to do with positivism, and a revolutionary topology of immanent abstract machines replaces the belief in matter as already formed and objectively given. At its most simple, folding can be understood as a kind of osmosis between milieu and body, whole and part, multiplicity and identity, substance and mode (EPS ), society and subject (F), state of affairs and proposition (LS ), past and present (C2 and PS ), virtual and actual (C2), a long series of dualities in Deleuze’s oeuvre. There are two ways in which folding matters. First, in the solo work of the 1960s it appears as heuristic to get at the interface between the universal and the individual, or the cosmos and the things in it. Second, in the 1980s, culminating in The Fold, Deleuze makes the concept more concrete and turns it into a figure of space. This mature notion of folding (plissement) is clearly inspired by mathematical topology, which abounds with objects having strange dimensionalities like loops, helixes, envelopes, twists, knots, pleats, tears, crumples, creases, and so on. Processes like invagination, involvement, involution, recoil, swerve, implosion, and so on cannot be thought in geometries of discrete dimensions. We should also note the etymological prevalence of folding in everyday terms and concepts such as twofold, fourfold, manifold, multiple, to apply, to

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comply, to multiply, to imply, to implicate, to explain, explicit, implicit, complicit, complicated, complexity, perplexity, to reply, to replicate, to unfold, to infold . . . Evidently the topological nature of folding has long made it attractive for capturing many of our most difficult notions. This also shows, incidentally, how thought and language already are deeply spatial. Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy, which together formed Deleuze’s doctoral requirements, return to a medieval debate about how God inheres in his creations, centered around the Neoplatonic idea of implication, which we have already encountered. In Expressionism in Philosophy, folding is mainly called expression. Sometimes Deleuze uses the term involution (in + volvere, to roll into) for implication (see also the translator’s notes on the language of folding, EPS 5–8). Hence “God is Nature ‘complicatively’; and this Nature both explicates and implicates, involves and evolves God. God ‘complicates’ everything, but all things explain and involve him” (EPS 16). Nature is production. It expresses itself in an infinity of things, but things are nothing but expressions of nature just as they are necessarily involved, comprehended, contained in it. This two-way but absolutely asymmetrical process is key to Deleuzian immanence. “The One remains involved in what expresses it, imprinted in what unfolds it, immanent in whatever manifests it: expression is in this respect an involvement” (EPS 16). We saw when discussing Spinoza’s bodies that they are ultimately modifications of one and the same underlying primordial reality he calls substance (that is, God). Unlike in traditional monotheism, Spinoza’s God is not “eminent” in relation to ordinary reality. On Deleuze’s insistence, Spinozian substance is in fact not “underlying” or “primordial” at all, but subsists on the same plane as, and simultaneously changes with, the myriad of things unfurling from it. Spinoza has traditionally been accused of pantheism. We have been discussing the problem of monism raised by Badiou. Does Deleuze believe, like Spinoza, Leibniz, and Bergson do in different ways, that there is an overarching Whole to spacetime, which is somehow more real and important than concrete things, even if it is thoroughly impersonal and nothing like the God as “he” is traditionally known? Is the universe one and eternal, and are things and events merely illusions? Not for Deleuze. The concept of a twodirectional expression is meant exactly to forestall this slippage into

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pantheism or Neoplatonic transcendence. Things and nature are immanent to each other and logically imply and involve each other in time. When a pin drops or a cat sneezes they are capacitated by nature to do so but thereby simultaneously “use up” a little of it and “add” something to it as well. Substance on Deleuze’s reading becomes “the unfolding of the absolute” (EPS 121). It becomes a genetic principle that does not preexist the modes it expresses itself into, and which is itself changed as events happen, so that “each form expresses, explicates or unfolds the absolute, but the absolute contains or ‘complicates’ an infinity of forms” (EPS 119). If space is an unfolding, it is impossible to think without time. The Logic of Sense uses the verbs “to unfold” and “to implicate” to think through the relation between bodies and language-events (the unfolding of sense). Deleuze’s psychoanalytical understanding of the conflict-prone zonal organization of the embodied self often reiterates the importance of thinking topologically. “The entire biopsychic life is a question of dimensions, projections, axes, rotations, and foldings. Which way should one take? On which side is everything going to tumble down, to fold or unfold?” (LS 222). Still, it is in Difference and Repetition that implication is most systematically developed, as we saw in the previous section. When that book uses the verb “to unfold” it is to characterize the peculiar way in which repetition materializes into difference: “the material repetition results from [a] more profound repetition which unfolds in depth and produces it as an effect, like an external envelope or a detachable shell which loses all meaning and all capacity to reproduce itself once it is no longer animated by the other repetition which is its cause” (DR 289). As we saw, Deleuze is mainly interested in morphological folding: “Embryology shows that the division of an egg into parts is secondary in relation to more significant morphogenetic movements: the augmentation of free surfaces, stretching of cellular layers, invagination by folding, regional displacement of groups” (DR 214). At the level of phylogeny he speaks also of the folding of one organ into another (DR 215). Altogether in Expressionism in Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, however, expression and implication are ways of developing ontological univocity at a formal level and do not have the topological pliability yet of the fold. Foucault gives a subjective twist to the fold concept, especially in the last chapter,“Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)”:

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Foucault continually submits interiority to a radical critique. But is there an inside that lies deeper than any internal world, just as the outside is farther away than any external world? The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside. F 96–97 The subject is not an interiority cut off from the world that would be external to it, as Descartes would have it, but a doubling in and of time, a repetition of the intensive differences between subjects. The Other is always-already in me. This crumpling of the social into a subject is rather like “the invagination of a tissue in embryology, or the act of doubling in sewing: twist, fold, stop, and so on” (98). Deleuze accepts that there is a clear “ethical turn” of Foucault in the 1980s when the latter suddenly became keenly interested in the creative possibilities that athletics, diet, and homosexual intercourse offered free men in ancient Greece. While such disciplinary regimens were definitely codes and assemblages of power/knowledge that integrated them into the Greek state, they also afforded for the first time a room for “self-development.” “This is what the Greeks did: they folded force, even though it still remained force. They made it relate back to itself” (101). The Greeks invented the self, but subjectivation happened only through and in what Foucault calls the “use of pleasure,” the deployment of social assemblages. It is not that you had the socius on one side and individuality on the other, but that the socius was warped, pleated, or regurgitated as something new and subjective that could also radically question that socius (cynics, skeptics, speaking the truth). Thinking from the outside – a notion Foucault himself introduced to characterize Maurice Blanchot’s post-phenomenological literary theory – is what Deleuze calls Foucault’s “aleatory” relations of forces (F 70ff). The outside is more than milieu. All organisms have milieus that they enfold while living but only human thinking enfolds an Outside, a plane of absolute deterritorialization behind actual milieus. The outside is not the sun outside Plato’s cave but a unique contribution of every critical thinker as s/he makes it her or his own. What Foucault distills is, as we saw, “diagrams” in which

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apparatuses of power/knowledge like the prison or paternalism are virtually mapped. Now, a Foucauldian diagram, “in so far as it exposes a set of relations between forces, is not a place but rather ‘a non-place’: it is the place only of mutation” (85), that is, it is a formalization “outside” the materiality of forces and environments that is the purview of knowledge. Hence “forces operate in a different space to that of forms, the space of the Outside, where the creation is precisely a ‘non-relation’, the place a ‘non-place’, and history an emergence” (87). Critical thought is a confrontation with the unknowable and unpredictable, which have to be thought, “an outside which is farther away than any external world and any form of exteriority, which henceforth becomes infinitely closer” (86). This has nothing to do with objectivism or ahistorical universality, because the creation of diagrams is necessarily an intervention into the distribution of forces (90). Hence “the outside is always an opening on to a future” (F 89). The abstract topology of a realm always already outside what is known that nonetheless drives it becomes the immanent ground we started looking for in Chapter 1. “The unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies at its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside” (97). Instead of the safe haven of an inner self of mainstream liberal philosophy inherited from Kant and Descartes, the thinking subject for Deleuze and Foucault dares the tempestuous outside and becomes more like a small boat at sea.

Baroque The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque is a strange treatise that gives a decidedly spatial twist to the Deleuzian concepts of difference, time, event, and freedom. Part of its strangeness is art-historical: Deleuze redefines “baroque” as a topological figure characterizing not just the architecture, painting, and music of early eighteenth-century Europe but its biology, mathematics, and metaphysics itself. And Leibniz’s metaphysics is already one of the strangest. Earlier in this chapter we saw that his differential calculus thinks declension or curvature is what gives matter its dynamism. Leibniz’s system begins with infinitesimal difference, with the fact there exists no “straight line without curves intermingled” (quoted in FLB 14): “Inflection is the

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ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold. Inflection is the authentic atom, the elastic point.” Instead of the point-like atoms of Lucretius, which are set in motion by an extraneous “swerve” or clinamen (LS 269–70), matter for Leibniz swerves “all the way down.” It is from this universal swerving that points, lines, bodies, and space are made. The Leibnizian universe is fundamentally turbulent (FLB 17). It is this psychedelic dynamism of spiraling vortices that Deleuze also claims is discovered in the ornamentalism of the Baroque, but one could equally find it in art deco, arabesques, and Indian art. “The Baroque artists know well that hallucination does not feign presence, but that presence is hallucinatory” (FLB 125). Unlike for Lucretius, for Leibniz there is no void, only continuous matter at every scale (except, as we will see, the infinitely small, which is made up of the monads). In his own famously dizzying words: “Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond” (Leibniz 1898: §67). The universe is the continual reconcatenation (catenare, to chain) of compounds of tiny living vortices. Leibniz opposes this massive concept of space as full and integrated, as “plenum,” to use the philosophical term, to the homogenous and empty space of Euclid, Descartes, and Newton. We cannot enter the important debate in the history of philosophy on the nature of space, but Deleuze summarizes Leibniz’s position in a standard way: “space-time is not a grid or a preexisting receptacle that would be filled” (FLB 66). Leibnizian space is not something separate from what populates it but the curving and dynamism of the things themselves, hence very close to how geographers use the term. For Leibniz, even the smallest event or body feels the vibrations of the whole universe since all things are in contact. For all is a plenum (and thus all matter is connected together) and in the plenum every motion has an effect upon distant bodies in proportion to their distance, so that each body not only is affected by those which are in contact with it and in some way feels the effect of everything that happens to them, but also is mediately affected by bodies adjoining those with which it itself is in immediate contact. Leibniz 1898: §61

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Physics after Einstein has partially vindicated this relative view of space, and biology or geology certainly cannot exist without thinking in terms of non-Newtonian space. The plenum is therefore far from monolithic. It is full of holes, spongy, and cavernous (FLB 38), exactly like the fractals and holey space we encountered in Chapter 3. Leibniz calls it an infinite labyrinth. Now, why does Deleuze call matter’s intensive self-fractalization folding? It seems to be the most helpful metaphor for capturing the fact that change is matter doubling in on itself, and that matter is in essence uneven, tilting, and scalar. The passage wherein Deleuze finds Leibniz himself using the metaphor is well worth quoting at length: The division of the continuous must not be taken as of sand dividing into grains, but as that of a sheet of paper or of a tunic in folds, in such a way that an infinite number of folds can be produced, some smaller than others, but without the body ever dissolving into points or minima. A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple extremity of a line. [. . .] Folds of winds, of waters, of fire and earth, and subterranean folds of veins of ore in a mine. In a system of complex interactions, the solid pleats of “natural geography” refer to the effect first of fire, and then of waters and winds on the earth; and the veins of metal in mines resemble the curves of conical forms, sometimes ending in a circle or an ellipse, sometimes stitching into a hyperbola or a parabola. The model for the sciences of matter is the “origami”, as the Japanese philosopher might say, or the art of folding paper. FLB 6 With our post-geographical understandings of difference as intensity, event, and flow, an origami universe makes perfect sense. A thousand plateaus means a thousand foldings: the world as millefeuille. There are further arguments that make Leibniz’s system weirder. I will mention three. First, the basic inflection at the heart of matter and hence space is not material and spatial itself, but a tiny soul, which Leibniz calls the monad. “If the world is infinitely cavernous,

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if worlds exists in the tiniest bodies, it is because everywhere there can be found ‘a spirit in matter’ [. . .]. The matter-fold is a mattertime; its characteristics resemble the continuous discharge of an ‘infinity of wind-muskets’ ” (FLB 7, quoting Leibniz). Matter contains infinitesimally small minds, which inhabit and cause folding to take place by subspatial nanobangs. Second, what each of these tiny minds perceives is the entire universe but from its singular point of view, slightly different from that of the neighboring monad. The extreme perspectivism of Leibniz’s monadology holds that the material universe is nothing but the infinite sum of all these tiny points of view. And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad. Leibniz 1898: §57 A city has no essence but is nothing but a multiplicity of perspectives as numerous as its material constituents. We saw Deleuze reads in Foucault that subjectivity is nothing but a twisting of space into a new inside and that expressionism becomes a Spinozian ethics of folding in affects. Now we see subjectivity has to express the whole universe. The world must be placed in the subject in order that the subject can be for the world. This is the torsion that constitutes the fold of the world and of the soul. And it is what gives expression its fundamental character: the soul is the expression of the world (actuality), but because the world is what the soul expresses (virtuality). FLB 26 Third, and most strangely, Leibniz holds that the monadic mindfolds are “windowless.” That is, they do not communicate with one another, although, as we just saw, all physical bodies interact. But what ensures that the inhabitants of a city or a pond can relate to

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each other if the universe differs for each? It is God who ensures all these tiny minds are folding in such a nonrandom way so as to create and maintain the universe as we know it: “each monad is none other than a passage of God: each monad has a point of view, but this point of view is the ‘result’ of God’s reading or viewing, which goes through the monad and coincides with it” (FLB 73). God is the cosmic programmer taking care for what Leibniz infamously calls the “preestablished harmony” of the universe (Leibniz 1898: §59). Baroque music (Bach, Vivaldi) is famous for its expression of a cosmos in perfect and soothing balance. But, as Deleuze reminds us (FLB 110), this theory of cosmic harmony was offered precisely when mercantile capitalism was starting to tear certainties asunder. For a post-Kantian atheist, preestablished harmony is where one has to depart from Leibniz. Deleuze does this subtly, by emphasizing that any monadic point of view is mostly “obscure,” to use Leibniz’s own metaphor. What a rock on Pluto perceives of the euro crisis is as good as fully obscure. If the “zone of clarity” perceived by a monad or a human subject lies only in its immediate vicinity, any agreement between perspectives is a fleeting achievement (FLB 130–31). It is unthinkable for atheism that the infinity of perspectives converge onto a harmonious whole. Deleuze ends his book by playing on the metaphor of harmony, arguing that “there can be no major and perfect accord in a monad unless there is a minor or dissonant accord in another, and inversely” (FLB 134). Proving the universe is not necessarily harmonious is of course what characterizes modern music (Deleuze mentions Stockhausen) and painting (Dubuffet). Only in the book’s final paragraph do we get a name for what abandons preestablished harmony and a metaphysical center: nomadology. For moderns the universe is no longer a home. After Nietzsche we know that every event is a dice throw putting the ground itself at risk with every throw, like lightning. But this is not to sound despairing. What contemporary art shows, for one, against the nostalgia for place in modern spiritualities, tourism, and most phenomenologies, is that homelessness at the level of existence is quite liberating. The outside can be enfolded according to criteria immanent to the exigencies of life instead of desperately trying to discover a source of meaning. Nomadism becomes the new ethos of reinventing oneself not despite but thanks to the cacophony of forces let loose from the metaphysical constrictions of transcendence.

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Time Maps in the common sense deny movement, and much of their ideological functionality derives from that denial. Arrows representing butterfly migration, human refugee streams, or capital flows do not explain the complex spatiotemporal dynamisms that structure the processes engendered by intensive disparities, as theorized in Difference and Repetition. But in the “cartography” redefined by Guattari (especially Schizoanalytic Cartographies) and Deleuze (especially Foucault), time is of the essence. This book too has throughout emphasized space is inevitably dynamic and hence inextricable from time. Space must engender change precisely because it is the ongoing materialization or enfolding of virtual fields continuously concatenating and differentiating. This is the space that geographers have strongly defended since the 1980s on both theoretical and political grounds (Massey 2005). Space is short for spacetime, while time should actually be written spacetime too. Each explicates difference in itself. Something is nothing but its temporality and spatiality. One remaining conundrum in a post-Deleuzian theory of space is Bergson’s polemic against space. Also, why does Deleuze philosophize space as subordinate to time in Difference and Repetition and the cinema books? Why is the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project usually understood as a universal history, not a political geography of globalization? Since Bergson explicitly blamed the concept of “space” for everything he disliked we must ask whether Deleuze might have inherited this “spatiophobia.” For Bergson, as we saw, the virtual is time itself. What science’s fundamentally “spatial” approach does is to occlude the virtual. In contrast, this book has argued that after Deleuze the virtual can only be thought spatially. This is in fact abundantly clear in his own writings, even when not spelled out. Hence “The actual and the virtual,” a brief set of notes from the 1980s, begins: Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run. These virtuals vary in kind as well as in their degree of proximity

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from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and absorbed. D 148 These lines state a few important points. First, though not part of sensible spacetime, tendencies are definitely spatial in some way or another, located almost at the event that actualizes them. An actual thing appears out of its own mist of tendencies. Second, perhaps confusingly, the virtual here is said to be composed of “images” instead of geometrical terms like lines, series, structures, functions, and so on. It is Bergson (1990) who calls the chains of virtual-actual linkages “images” in analogy with human recollections by association, bringing other recollections involuntarily into play à la Proust (see PS 19–24). In cinema, flashbacks, recurring tunes, and narrative sequences conspire to define the present. More generally, every image, every animal perception, is steeped in a mass of ultrarapid unconscious associations. Bergson claims that reality forms at the rate of the passing present itself. Third, virtuality for Deleuze is continually secreted and assimilated by actual things. There is a constant “oscillation” between the two whereby both change constantly. Fourth, the image-cloud enveloping a thing goes from extremely dense just next to it to ever more rarefied further away. Bergson says images come in “circuits” (1990: 104ff). Deleuze’s essay and cinema books call them bands, layers, slivers, sheets, and so on. All these metaphors, including image itself, hint at a deeper spatiality that is transcendentally bound with the self-organizing of the virtual and of time. Difference and Repetition develops Deleuze’s original philosophy of time. Broadly following Kant’s lead, time is not something that can be thought of as “objective.” Time is continually assembled out of syntheses, that is, it only exists within the process of events (including thinking) taking place. Time has to be obtained, and Deleuze has a complex theory, largely following Bergson, of how the moving present comes about by abandoning but also activating the past and thereby plunging into the future. There is time because of three passive syntheses, that is, because a thing or a subject endures three kinds of time-assembling. The first synthesis is habit, or the “living present,” a kind of territorialization in which the recollection of what was structures what is now. Habit is merely regularity in the enfolding of a milieu. “We are made of contracted

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water, earth, light and air – not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these perceptual elements, but prior to their being sensed” (DR 73). The second synthesis secures the asymmetry of time, the fact that the past passes but also continues in the present that seizes it. Deleuze’s theory of the past is paradoxical and difficult, but in a nutshell it explains time’s inevitable ongoingness and self-bifurcation, the “arrow of time” made central by twentieth-century physics beyond Newton (see Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 51ff, 257ff). For Bergson the entire past is replayed in each instant but each time absolutely differently, which gives time direction. The whole past shapes every present with which it is simultaneous, but is thereby all the time completely renewed. There is therefore in Bergson–Deleuze a coincidence of destiny with absolute novelty and absolute freedom. “We say of successive presents which express a destiny that they always play out the same thing, the same story, but at different levels: here more or less relaxed, there more or less contracted” (DR 83). In Bergson’s famous diagram (1990: 162), the present is the point of a cone that stretches to infinity. The bands on the cone express the “degree” to which the past is recollected and condenses into the present’s irreversible train of motion. There is a continuous “oscillation” between the present and the totality of recollectionimages that enables the body to act and accompany it virtually. Deleuze’s third synthesis of time is more speculative. He provocatively reworks Nietzsche’s (1961) idea of the eternal return as an intuition which grasps the fact that time unfolds. Now, we know reality at its basis consists of nothing but difference-in-itself. Instead of the cyclical return of the same in the mythological concept of time in pagan culture, Nietzsche’s radically ethical concept of recurrence is an active “selection” of precisely those elements of the past that will increase one’s power of acting, that is, affirm the difference that one already is (NP 68ff). More metaphysically, however, the eternal return constitutes time by making difference revolve around and in-volve itself. “We misinterpret that expression ‘eternal return’ if we understand it as ‘return of the same’. It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes” (NP 48). The third dimension of time in Difference and Repetition is then the opening of the present onto the future, onto contingency, because every identity

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(place, body) is internally fissured by multiplicity (DR 300). Beneath its irreversible passing, beneath its contracting rhythms, time comes about by affirming chance, Nietzsche’s cosmological dice throw that ejects sameness forever into the past (1961: 244ff, see NP 25– 27). It is no wonder Deleuze likes a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “time is out of joint” (for example, DR 298). The question this brief discussion of time raises, however, is whether contraction, habit, passing, out-of-jointness, chance, even paradox itself, can be conceived without recourse to topology or space. Cinema 2 supplies a fuller theory of how images constitute the object, and create time, by circulating around and through the present (C2 47–48 and 68ff). Again systematizing an embryonic idea in Bergson, Deleuze says the virtual “crystallizes” into the actual exactly where its images are densest (C2 chapter 4). All actualization is rather like snow forming as seen under a microscope: structures emerging spontaneously from an invisible but real background of instructive latencies. Deleuze argues that classical cinema (until the 1940s) focused on what he calls the movement-image, an overarching organization of movements of gestures, actors, shots, soundscapes, fields, and so on according to an “open whole” in which Bergsonian duration takes place exactly like the dissolving sugar cube (C1 9–10). In prewar cinema movement is spatial, constrained, predictable. In contrast, the time-image invented in the 1950s and 1960s (though Citizen Kane is a famous earlier effort) is what fleshes out Deleuze’s more radical conception of time. The temporality of movies like Last Year at Marienbad or Mulholland Drive is no longer anchored in a whole or a linear succession of moments. The events in such a movie directly present a nonchronological and continually new time. The movie’s movements are unhinged from “space” qua homogeneous logic. What comes to matter is only what occurs between images. The order of such films is no longer representable, it is no longer spatial in the common meaning but what Deleuze above called the outside, “or ‘the vertigo of spacing’: that void which is no longer a motor-part of the image, and which is the radical calling into question of the image” (C2 180, quoting Blanchot). Is this vertigo of spacing not precisely what this book has been calling space? If time makes movement possible, it would seem space makes time possible. There is no doubt that Bergson is modern philosophy’s most formidable champion of movement. This is what

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made him so influential during the ascendency of automobility and electronic mass media. After having examined the irreducible dynamism of space throughout this book, however, it is puzzling that Bergson should think he can subtract space from spacetime and denigrate it as in part illusionary (see Massey 2005: 20–24). What both intuition and physics show is that there can be no movement or change without space. Why does Bergson equate space with quantity and stasis? Mathematics itself, especially since Riemann, operates with spaces that differ qualitatively and intensively (topology). For Bergson space is necessary for corporeal life and science but it obscures reality’s more interesting half, the processes of self-differentiating, continuation, and enduring. That is, for Bergson, quite simply, space cancels time. What is spatial obliterates the realm of infinitely mobile self-differentiation that gave rise to it. This Bergsonian argument, that virtual differences precede and exceed the actual differences they give rise to but are necessarily crowded out in the process of becoming actualized, is also key to the projects of both Deleuze and Guattari. But it does not necessarily lead to denying the ultimate reality of space. After all, an existent object literally takes the place of an intensive field that forms (informs) and exceeds it. Put differently: “Intensity is the uncancellable in difference in quantity, but this difference of quantity is cancelled by extension, extension being precisely the process by which intensive difference is turned inside out and distributed in such a way as to be dispelled, compensated, equalised and suppressed in the extensity which it creates” (DR 233). The conditions leading to the differentiation of the chaosmos into an intensive field have not disappeared and continue to subsist “beneath” the object. The task of philosophy becomes to excavate the differentiation concealed by differenciation. As the everyday example of playing piano indicated, theorizing this concealment need not get us into pious or vitalist waters at all. This fundamentally critical conception of space – that it structurally masks its own truth – is after Deleuze turned into a political potentiality, even if Bergson himself was rather conservative. While Deleuze does not follow Bergson in calling space or matter the blockage of becoming, his metaphysical preference for time is evident, and he does not explicitly critique Bergson’s misguided conflation of space with Newtonianism. But we have just seen that it might be one of the biggest ironies in the history of philosophy that Bergson’s affirmation of time as contraction, crystallization,

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circuitry, conical, and so on proceeds through a disavowed spatiality. Likewise, Deleuze could perhaps have been clearer about how the actual impacts on the virtual, how extensity shapes intensity, how time requires space. Space is more fundamental to his thought than he himself acknowledged. Work is still to be done to think through how there must be transcendental syntheses of space for perception or cinema or thinking to happen at all. In any case, this book has provided plenty of entry-points to Deleuze’s oeuvre that invite geographers and other students of space to rethink their conceptual premises. After Deleuze, dynamic cartographies can be invented in which space is necessarily traversed by time and being is only possible thanks to becoming. Even then, we have often seen how territorialization is spawned by way of deterritorialization, especially under capitalism. A post-Deleuzian theory of spacetime yields a kind of novelty that does not fall prey to the repetition of either tradition or the market. In these times of ecological, economic, and political disaster, when time itself seems to be running out, space has increasingly become the impetus of thought.

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INDEX

Althusser, Louis 37, 51–2, 72, 74, 81, 123 Amin, Samir 62, 77, 155–6 anarchism 1, 10, 22, 33, 35–6, 38, 53, 87, 95, 112, 136 Anthropocene 3–4, 22, 25–8, 30, 33–4, 36, 39, 45, 87, 96, 138, 151 anthropocentrism 4, 22, 50–1, 57, 64, 96–7, 127, 169 Aristotle 47, 52, 105, 127, 130, 173, 183, 185 Artaud, Antonin 67, 82, 91–5, 123, 134–6 assemblage 26–8, 38, 59–60, 83, 97–100, 113–14, 116–17, 119–20, 122–3, 125, 126, 129, 141–2, 147–8, 152, 164, 171, 190, 199 Auschwitz 36 authenticity 10–11 Bach, Johann Sebastian 204 Bacon, Francis (painter) 193–4 Badiou, Alain 1, 30, 39, 46–8, 50–2, 69, 73, 165, 170, 177–9, 191–2 Bateson, Gregory 30–2, 55–6, 140 Beckett, Samuel 163–4 Bergson, Henri 27–8, 37, 110, 173–7, 179–83, 188, 196–6, 205–10 biosphere 26–8

black hole 5, 19–20, 24, 95, 121, 140–1, 151, 176, 179 Blair, Tony 75 Blanchot, Maurice 199, 208 Boulez, Pierre 107 Bousquet, Joë 166–7 Braudel, Fernand 13, 18, 41, 77, 107, 150 Brontë, Charlotte 167 Buddhism 15, 92, 166 bureaucracy 59, 103, 121, 125, 191 Burroughs, William S. 90 calculus 48, 182–3 Cantor, Georg 47–8, 50, 192–3 capital 16, 25, 34, 35, 37–40, 42, 44, 51, 70–80, 139, 142–3 Cézanne, Paul 112 cinema 13, 67–9, 159–64, 206, 208 class (sociology) 51, 65, 74–7, 103–04, 120, 125 codes 19–20, 22, 72, 75, 185–6 Cold War 86–7, 125 complexity theory 21–2, 97–100, 187 concepts 3–4, 15–16, 32 Copernicus, Nicolaus 7, 9, 12, 96 Crane, Stephen 93–4 Cuvier, Georges 96–7 Darwin, Charles, Darwinism 61, 116, 129, 138, 185–7 debt 71, 74, 79, 91, 96 Defoe, Daniel 61–4 215

216

INDEX

DeLanda, Manuel 97–8, 178 Deligny, Fernand 119 democracy 16, 67, 88, 100, 131, 157 Descartes, René 9, 39, 83, 109, 112, 123, 127, 139, 196, 199–200 desire 32, 81, 85, 88–90, 101–4, 120–2, 132–3, 136–3 despotism 15, 40–1, 53, 59, 74, 76, 79, 100, 102–03, 121, 148, 164 dialectic 27, 50, 97, 102, 113–14 distribution 53, 91, 200 Dubuffet, Jean 204 Einstein, Alfred 146, 202 Eisenstein, Sergei 69 environmentalism 5, 18, 28, 33, 38, 60, 100, 132, 157, 169 Epicureanism 166 eschatology 42, 66 essence, essentialism 8–9, 11, 13, 21, 39, 46, 50–1, 66, 93, 97, 100, 114, 116, 123, 130, 168, 173, 177–8, 180, 184–6, 203 Euclidian geometry 5, 48–9, 72–3, 86, 90, 109–10, 147–9, 164, 194, 201 fascism 22, 104, 117, 120–1, 130, 137, 141 Fellini, Frederico 161 feminism 38, 51, 105, 126, 154 Foucault, Michel 18, 20–1, 87, 89–90, 95, 123, 132, 141, 154, 190–1, 198–200, 203 foundationalism 8–12, 28–9, 102 fractal geometry 15, 110, 202 Frankfurt School 42, 81 Freinet, Célestin 158 Freud, Sigmund 18, 57–8, 122, 128, 134, 141

Galilei, Galileo 2, 7, 127, 182 Gama, Vasco da 107 Gender see patriarchy, sexuality geocentrism 9 God, gods 9, 19–20, 29, 43, 47, 52–3, 59, 98, 127, 128, 134, 139, 144, 147, 197, 204 Godard, Jean-Luc 159, 164 Google 105, 171 Greece, ancient 14–16, 153–4, 199 Griffith, David Wark 68 haecceity 167, 170 Harvey, David 71–6 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1, 14, 77, 123, 183 Heidegger 2, 10–12, 14, 38, 126, 129, 132, 165, 168, 179, 181 Heraclitus of Ephesus 92 heritage 161, 169, 180 Hjelmslev, Louis 18–21 Hobbes, Thomas 63 humanism, antihumanism 4, 29, 38, 126, 129, 169, 190 Huxley, Aldous 63 immanence 9–11, 15, 43–4, 97, 131, 144–6, 160, 164, 192–3, 197 Jesus Christ, Christianity 4, 13, 39, 42, 67, 89, 91, 92, 134, 140, 142 judgment 19–20, 91, 134–6 Kafka, Franz 67–8, 125, 135 Kant, Immanuel 3, 7, 9–10, 28, 47, 129, 133, 144, 159–60, 164, 180, 200, 204 Kerouac, Jack 54, 152 Klee, Paul 66 Klein, Melanie 134 Kleist, Heinrich von 121–2 Lacan, Jacques 73, 81, 110, 134, 160, 189, 195

INDEX

land 52–3, 75–8, 147–50 landscape 2, 54–6, 68, 71, 117–18, 140–2, 148, 161, 168, 178, 180, 194 Latour, Bruno 98 Lawrence, Thomas Edward 53, 92–5 learning 174–5 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van 96–7 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 48, 50, 52, 96, 118, 165, 173, 182–3, 200–4 Lenin, Vladimir 67, 103–4, 169, 191 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1–16, 50, 53, 124 liberalism 1, 16, 34, 40, 63, 66, 82, 88, 131, 152–3, 157, 200 Linnaeus, Carl 185 Löwith, Karl 67 Lucretius Carus, Titus 28, 201 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 104, 159 Lyell, Charles 18 machinic enslavement 80–1, 84–5 Mahler, Gustav 68, 118 Malthusianism 116 Maoism 37, 95, 103, 121 Marx, Karl, Marxism 16, 18–19, 25–6, 30, 31, 33–43, 51, 62–5, 70–80, 100, 106, 112, 131–2, 168–9 masochism 32, 133, 136 Massey, Doreen 76, 85, 167–9, 205, 209 Massumi, Brian 147 materialism 2, 11–13, 22, 27, 29–30, 38, 46–8, 65, 73, 111, 131, 165, 177, 196 May 1968 35, 37–8, 69, 94, 104, 154, 178, 191 Mercator, Gerardus 109 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 132 metaphor 12, 36, 135, 202, 206

217

migration 56–7, 65, 68 milieu 15, 50, 115–17, 138, 192, 206–7 minorities 156–7 Mitterand, François 75 Mondrian, Piet 145 Moses 58–9, 89 Mumford, Lewis 148 music 24, 68, 107, 109, 113–19, 181, 204 nation, nationalism 13, 24, 53–5, 57, 68–9, 77, 94, 107, 117–18, 131, 141, 154, 156 nature 28–9, 62, 65, 83, 192 Negri, Antonio 34–6, 76, 131, 178 neoliberalism 27, 37, 40–1, 75, 87, 111, 141, 146 New Age 27, 38, 139 Newton, Isaac 2, 48–9, 105, 110, 111, 123, 146, 172, 182, 201, 207, 209 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8–12, 13, 41–2, 54, 74, 91–2, 96, 100, 117–18, 130, 165–6, 176, 204, 207–8 One-All 29–30, 144 outside 12, 196–200 Pasteur, Louis 96–7 Patriarchy 4, 39, 56, 90, 108, 117, 121, 131, 161 phenomenology 1, 10, 29, 50, 56, 64, 105, 114, 126–7, 132–3, 139, 189, 204 Planck, Max 96–7 plate tectonics 17–18, 46 Plato, Platonism 9, 11, 13, 28, 50–1, 93, 118, 144, 177, 197–8, 199 Pollock, Jackson 195 pragmatism 176 primitives see savages

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INDEX

primitive accumulation 78–9, 148 Prometheanism 25 Proust, Marchel 132, 178, 206 psychoanalysis 32, 101, 126, 198 Ptolemy, Claudius 9 quantum physics 49, 101, 149, 176, 186, 190 race, racism 4, 10, 21, 23, 46, 51, 55, 59, 62, 65, 85, 92, 95, 120, 139–43, 157, 177 Rawls, John 91 Reagan, Ronald 113 refugees 60, 205 relay 116 religion 9–11, 15, 29, 42, 117 representation 81, 126–7, 140–1, 147–9, 178, 181, 193–4 resemblance 174 revolution 16, 30, 33–43, 54, 66, 92–5, 102–4, 111–12, 120, 170, 191–2 rhizomatics 18, 27, 31–2, 51, 119, 146, 193 Ricardo, David 148 Riemann, Bernhard 48–9, 110, 112, 145–7, 209 Romanticism 28, 41, 57, 66, 68, 95, 117–18, 121–2, 166, 168 Rossellini, Roberto 161, 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 28, 63–5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 132–3 savages 14, 40–1, 53, 62–3, 65, 76, 79, 100, 124 Scotus, John Duns 167 securitization 60, 86–90, 120–1, 141–2 set theory 46–50, 183–4 Seurat, Georges 145 sexuality 31, 32, 64, 80, 95, 120, 122, 124–5, 129, 137, 141, 154, 156, 199

singularity 24, 39–40, 53, 61, 75, 93, 105, 110, 165, 168, 174–6, 181 social contract 62–3 societies of control 35, 90, 151–2 soundscape 115–16 Spinoza, Baruch 28–9, 65, 73, 83, 127–32, 136, 147, 152–3, 191–2 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 204 Stoicism 56, 90–5, 165–6 structure, structuralism 2, 31, 37, 50–1, 72, 99–102, 114, 117–18, 122, 126, 147, 160, 178, 185–6, 189–91, 206 swarms 58 Tarantino, Quentin 164 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 28 textile 108–9 thermodynamics 97, 111, 122, 186 topology 49–50, 97–9, 109–10, 121, 135–6, 146, 190, 197–200 tourism 60–1, 157–8, 204 Tournier, Michel 64–5 Toynbee, Arnold 53–4 transcendence 19–20, 29–30, 79, 97, 145, 164 transcendental method 3, 4–5, 10–11, 47, 73, 86, 110, 144, 159–60, 178–9, 182, 206 Trier, Lars von 41 Trump, Donald 157, 161 Tuan, Yi-Fu 56, 105 Tzu, Sun 84 Uexküll, Jakob von 118, 127–9, 191 uneven development 51, 79–80, 168, 179 universal history 14, 38, 40–2 univocity 29–30, 198 urbanization 79–80, 112, 150–1 utopia 42, 66, 100

INDEX

Vernadsky, Vladimir 28 Virilio, Paul 66, 83–7, 89, 90, 112, 147, Vivaldi, Antonio 201 vitalism 26–30, 33, 111, 132, 182, 209

Wallerstein, Immanuel 77 war on terror 87, 91, 157 Whitehead, Alfred North 165 Žižek, Slavoj 34, 42

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